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Summer's End

© Linda Mazar

Already in Minnesota the State Fair is in full swing, the gardens are past their prime, and thoughts of autumn flit in and out of our minds. As we gobble down one more caramel apple on a stick and our eyes fall on the gardens we find it's time to take stock. The growing season is coming to an end. It's time to see what worked and what didn't and to start our fall season clean up.

We had an unusual growing season this year. Late spring was very wet and cool. Many plants got sowed or planted later than usual. Then the weather suddenly switched from rainy and cool to hot and dry with hardly any mild normalness time in between. Plants that had been stunted or rotting in the wet, dried out and suffered from the abrupt change. And since the hot, dry weather stayed, it was very stressful for the plants.

We found that getting our tomatoes in late has greatly reduced our harvest Knowing the first frost could come anytime this month, I don't expect that we will have much of a harvest at all. Next year we have to get them planted on time or we may as well forget planting them at all unless they are a short-season variety. Our peppers have had the same fate. There are very few and those present are very late this year.

Our annual flowers did OK. They grew very slowly at first, but finally toward the end of the season they have spread out and made themselves seen. I especially like the Profusion Zinnias (cherry). They are short plants, but bushy and covered with blooms. I think we'll try these again next year. The Salvia (Victoria's Blue) did fairly well too and looks nice with the zinnias. We will have to use this combination again somewhere.

We have 2 new perennial beds this year that are pretty large. The first couple years the plants always look too small, but we have great hopes that they will mature into lovely gardens in a couple years. The established perennial beds had a lot of divisions taken from them this year, so they looked a little sparse as well, but next year they will have fully recovered and will be showing off well for the season. We had less of a problem with slugs in the hosta this year, which I put down to the dryness of the season. Hopefully there will be fewer next year as well. I can always hope.

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