We want to know what is next on our list to get our homes and gardens and landscapes all ready for late fall and winter.

Well, here's Fall Gardening Chores Part 2, all about trees, shrubs, and perennials.

If you have a new tree or shrub that you planted in the landscape, hopefully you've been watering it well.

You want to keep watering it, even if it's a deciduous plant, right up until the ground freezes.

It's been dry this fall.

You want to make sure those roots, as they continue to grow, even when the temperatures get down in the 30s and 40s, The roots will continue to grow.

You also want to protect them.

Will that kill the lowbush blueberries? They are spread wide enough that they would not be hard to hit when brush hogging.

I'd love for you to walk us through what are some of the fall gardening chores that we should really maybe start tackling now?

Yes.

For part one, we're going to be focusing on vegetable gardens and annual flower gardens.

So I'm going to run through a whole list of things there, and hopefully this is going to remind you what to do and how to do it.

I'm a big no-dig gardener, and we don't like to pull plants out of the ground, so we chop them back.

And if you have healthy foliage plants, most of them are probably killed now by the frost, but if they were healthy, didn't have insects and disease problems on them, Plants like beans and lettuces and peppers, chop them and drop them.

Just chop them up with a hedge trimmer into little pieces.

Any suggestions or comments are welcomed.

But What are some other really cool decorating ideas for this time of year?

Yeah, you know, Halloween has gotten to be one of the biggest holidays for decorating in the country.

Being gardeners, of course, we like to use natural materials to do our decorating.

There are some kind of really cool pumpkins out there right now.

The knucklehead.

Those are the warty ones.

and don't forget those small gourds some of those gourds are really cool some of them look like a skeleton hand almost so you can imagine ways to use those as decorations in the landscape if you're making scarecrows that you're going to be hanging around the landscape on the porch or anywhere else around the yard maybe get some wispy ornamental grasses for the hair some of the miscanthus grasses that are there in the switchgrass.

Also, is the fall a good time to spread composted cow manure around these trees and the mature maple trees? And what other things should we think about doing for the apples and fruit trees around this time of year?

But you've got some different kinds of kale that we can try.

Yes, a lot of people, even though they may eat it, they don't think about growing it.

First of all, the varieties, the lachinata or the dinosaur kale, very famous one, very popular one, great thick leaf to them, really tough plant.

These are kind of the kales that are good for making soups and sautés and things.

You really have to cook them because they are kind of tough, even after a couple frosts.

The ones I really like are called the boar, B-O-R, kale.

Star boar and red boar.

We'd appreciate any insight and guidance you can give us to avoid last winter's near-death experience.

What happens when we plan ahead and order a bunch of spring flowering bulbs and we plant them and then those adorable little critters that live in our lawn treat those flowering bulbs like their favorite salad bar?

yes that's probably one of the more frustrating things about spending all this money and time and energy about planting them and then nothing comes up next year and then you dig around you see they're all eaten and that can happen with certain flower spring flowering bulbs the mice the voles the chipmunks love to tunnel down and find them and make them their own personal salad bar as you mentioned So, there are different strategies to protect your bulbs, and so this is what I would suggest.

Their palate is such that not all the bulbs are tasty to them.

So, they love tulips and crocus, for example, but they don't really like narcissus or daffodils, alliums or fritillarias or snowdrops.

You can mix those bulbs in with the favorite bulbs, and so when they're tunneling down and they eat them, they're more likely to eat one of the bulbs they don't like, they'll spit it out, and then they run away.

and leave the rest and leave all those bulbs alone.

So that's one possibility is to mix them.

Do you think that the water and bleach combination is causing them to die a slow death?

How do I accomplish that? And am I too late to plant trees and shrubs for next year?

Well, you're certainly not too late.

And yes, you still can do that.

And you can have plants that are even bigger than the ones that the squirrels are planting.

Fall is a great time to plant trees and shrubs.

There's lots of sales at nurseries.

And now is the time to do it because you want to get your tree or shrub in the ground at least four to six weeks before the ground freezes.

Dan wrote in to say, how do I get rid of creeping Charlie weed?

But you have some great tips on how to bring some things indoors.

Yes, we have a front porch loaded with some beautiful annuals.

They're either colorful foliage ones or flowering ones, but I know that almost all of them will not make it through the winter.

So the solution is to do cuttings.

You can take cuttings of a lot of our favorite annuals, everything from geraniums to coleus to begonias and fuchsias to vinca and pentas.

They're really easy to take cuttings from.

you create some small little plants that you then can bring inside have them in a sunny window all winter and then repot them to bring them back back out next year the other nice thing about this technique is that you're taking away 99 of a foliage so you're less likely to bring insects into the house get scissors or some pruners make a cut right below the node that's where the two leaves might be coming out two or three leaves might be coming out right below that is where you want to cut it and then strip off all the bottom leaves.

Is there any antibacterial remedy for bacterial canker?

Tell us more about these experiments you've been doing with different kinds of nuts, especially hazelnuts.

Yeah.

So, you know, we're always trying new things here in our yard.

We have some big shagbark hickories behind our house, which, of course, have lots of nuts that mostly the squirrels eat.

I put in some chestnuts and the one I'm really interested in is the hazelnut.

Now, the American hazelnut and the beaked hazelnut are Native American shrubs.

They're great wildlife shrubs.

Is there any hope of getting rid of them? And if so, how do I do it?

What do we plant if we're looking for something that's going to bring us color in our gardens later in the summer?

Yeah, we're kind of in a little low period here.

So all the real summer bloomers are kind of fading.

But the big show of things like asters and goldenrods and sedums really hasn't started up in full force yet.

So they have this in-between period in early September.

And this is a good time of year to look at what else is flowering in your neighborhood or in your friend's gardens.

And there's a couple of plants that I think people should grow more of.

Do you know what type of disease this is and what can I do to remove it, whatever pathogen is in that bed?

Do you know what might be causing this, and what can I do about it?

Yes, it could be the cherry leaf spot disease.

It could actually be bacterial canker.

But if it's bacterial canker, you'd see some of the gummiosis, that gummy stuff on the stems.

So that's something to look for.

If it's a cherry leaf spot, the leaves will just drop prematurely.

And because we've had such humid weather, that's probably what it is.

What should I do?

Yeah.

If you wanna grow some table grapes like those, that's great.

You...

If you wanna grow juice grapes, there's lots of varieties.

Concord, uh, Bluebell, Swenson Red, Idle Wise, Valiant.

If you're growing your grapes, look for a place where you can just have a row about three feet wide, and it could be against the garage, a barn, a wall, anywhere, any place like that.

And then you wanna put some posts in them about six feet apart and plant your grapes there.

Can I plant these wildflowers in the fall, or should I wait until spring?"

What kind of hydrangeas are these and what can I do to encourage more flowering?

Well, Ellen, most likely you have a hydrangea macrophylla, which is the blue hydrangea based on that flowers that are blooming in that photo.

And those bloom on the old wood, meaning that the stems you see now that are alive, they need to make it through the winter.

And then next spring, they will send out flower buds and you'll have flowers early in the season.

If they die over winter...

Or if the flower buds get killed by a late spring frost, you don't get flowers until much later like you're seeing there.

So the key is to protect the stems.

Is there a better way?

Mm

... is blooming.

Asters are coming along.

You can go out there in some abandoned fields.

Of course, get permission [laughs] if you're gonna do that.

And, and harvest some of those flowers and, and use those.

But as far as ones you're gonna grow, lots of annuals are great, and if you're just starting out, things like zinnias and sunflowers are really easy to grow.

This summer, only half of it's coming back, and it didn't start showing any leaves until just recently, weeks after normally beginning to show life." Cara writes, "We'll cut the dead limbs, but do you have any other suggestions on how to prevent the tree from dying off, especially before next spring?"

Yeah.

So the way to know when to harvest that is when it turns the full color of whatever variety it is, no resistance.

If there's resistance, it's not quite ripe yet.

Same thing with the blackberry.

Doesn't have a cone, but you should be able to pull the berry, and it should just pop right off of it.

Plums and peaches are coming along really soon.

Uh, plums, you wanna wait for the full color of that plum.

What's going on there?"

It looks like they may have rotted on their tomato plant.

Yes.

Thanks for sending the photo, Mary and Ed, because that really helps.

And they did in fact rot.

Uh, you can see the rot goes all the way down to the roots and then up a n- number of inches up the stem.

And that's because of the cool, wet conditions we had earlier in the season, and the soil wasn't well-drained, and so it tends to rot.

The other possibility w- it would be there's an insect called a pill bug.

Mm-hmm.

Can you talk about verbascum or mullein?

Yes, I'd love to talk about Molinor verbascum.

This is a plant that comes in in eroded areas or in new construction areas, and you'll see it starting to grow.

And it has these big leaves that are silvery and soft and hairy.

And they also send up a tall flower spike down the center, and that is usually yellow.

So it can grow three, four, five feet tall.

So it's really an outstanding plant.

What can I do with that?

But why is that and how do we get seeds to even germinate if it's, you know, blazing hot in July?

yeah there is a certain technique you have to use so this time of year it's good not to give up on your garden as far as what's going to happen in the fall because you can plant things now that in september october november even you can be enjoying cucumbers beans zucchinis all kinds of things so those warm summer crops like zucchinis summer squash and cucumbers and beans you can plant them now I just put in our last crop of beans into our garden here in July.

You can look for transplants at garden centers for the zucchini and summer squash and cucumbers and pop those in.

You can even try seeds of those if you're in warm parts of the states.

You might get a nice crop out of them later in the season.

You may have to protect them.

So those are pretty straightforward and easy because they like it hot.

Do you have any suggestions for that?

What do you have for suggestions there?

Well, I've got a classic one.

It's the daylily.

Daylilies are a pretty diverse plant, and there's some new ones out there that are really worth taking a look at.

We see the orange tawny daylilies by the roadside.

We see the lemon daylily, which is one of the first ones to bloom.

A lot of old-fashioned varieties that are out there.

Would these geraniums do that, or are there other better ways to get rid of the ivy?

So what types of sweet potatoes do best in our growing zone, and can we plant them in raised beds too?

Uh, yes, Karen.

You know, even though it's the end of June, we still have some time to get a quick crop of sweet potatoes in, and that's kind of as odd thing to say 'cause sweet potatoes take a long time to grow.

Uh, but if you use varieties like Beauregard and Vardaman and O'Henry, these are short, uh, season varieties that mature a little bit faster.

So start with that.

You'll have to try to find the slips locally.

Uh, it's a little too late to start your own, uh, but if you can get some slips, then there's a couple ways to really maximize the heat, which is what, of course, sweet potatoes really like.

So Charlie, what's the best way for Ingrid to tackle those kiwi vines?

Patricia in Tunbridge wrote, "What are your recommendations for controlling chervil, or is this plant gonna take over the whole state?" [laughs]

Uh, chervil is a, a very aggressive, uh, invasive weed.

Grows up about three feet tall, for people who are not familiar with it, with, uh, little white flowers, usually in May, but it does spread.

Uh, so the best thing to do is to realize that it's a biennial, meaning that it spreads mostly by dropping seeds.

Uh, so if you can reduce the amount of seed in the soil, that's gonna help get rid of it eventually.

Kinda like the poison parsnip in that way.

So what I would suggest doing, uh, is that, um, as it's growing up, when it gets the flower, cut it down.

Can I grow lavender in those tires, and if so, what should I do to prepare them for maximum success with minimum upkeep?"

Love that one

...

it sows and grows itself kinda thing, and all the different vegetables and herbs and flowers, annual edible flowers, that will literally come back year after year if you just let them go through their whole life cycle.

So these are good chapters that kind of highlight this whole idea of how do we garden more in tune with nature, making less work for us, and making for healthier plants, uh, in our garden.

And then the second theme is really about the continuous vegetable garden thing, 'cause we've all been down that path of growing too many lettuces, too many sh- beans, too many zucchinis.

You know, you just get, it ... overwhelmed with them.

You're, you're putting zucchinis in your neighbor's car when they're not looking [laughs] you know, doing things like that.

Nice.

Do you have any suggestions for some things that we can plant?

Yes, I've got a perfect one for people who just don't want to have to fuss with their ground covers and with their perennials.

And it's the perennial geranium.

The wild version of this is geranium maculatum.

The one that we mostly see is a geranium sanguinum.

And what's so nice about this geranium is that it stays low, about a foot or so tall.

It spreads slowly.

Maybe oats or something else?

Can you help promote such an effort?

Oh, of course.

I'm always a big advocate of that.

And I just want to tell people, though, if you are going to grow extra food for a food shelf, food pantry, whatever you have in your local community, make sure you talk to them first and find out what they want, when they want it, and how they want it.

Because everybody's a little bit different as far as their hours and what kind of produce.

And you want to make sure the produce is fresh when it gets into the hands of the people that need it.

What needs to be done so I can get more mature berries?

Well, it's kind of curious that you're not getting berries at ripening since you already got them to set.

So tell us, if you would, about how your growing style is different today.

Sure.

So as you said, I, I grew up in Connecticut with my Italian grandparents' farm in our backyard, and every time one of the kids got married, they gave a piece of land on the farm for them to build their house.

So I had my whole aunts and uncles and cousins, the whole Italian enclave right there.

And my mother, being a farmer's daughter, uh, wanted to have her own garden.

So every spring my grandfather would come up with the tractor and until the soil, and my mom would get us, me and my two brothers, the boys, out there picking stones, and she would come in with all her transplants and her seeds and her 10-10-10 fertilizer and her bags of Sevin Dust.

[laughs] I remember Sevin Dust.

So could you give us some examples?

Mm

...

this past winter because it was such a severe winter.

So you wanna cut them way back to where there's some live growth.

So wait till you see live growth from the bottom of the plant.

Take all the dead growth out.

Any little twiggy growth that's not gonna really create nice flowers, you can remove that.

Okay.