Fall Back in Love with Your Yard

It looks to be a beautiful weekend, for once. With that being said, my family will be going into full-on fall gardening attack mode to fix the lawn and flower beds overgrown from enormous amounts of rain this season.

On the spectrum of green thumb to plant killer, I'd like to think I'm greenish. While I don't consider myself an expert, I know who to call with my flower and lawn care dilemmas. With a little advice from my local nursery and master gardener pals, I'm hoping my fall gardening efforts will pay off in the spring, and leave my yard looking not so dead throughout the winter. Here's my plan of attack:

Lawn Care
I like to say that we just love bunnies, and that's why we are providing a field of clover to support their habitat, but honestly the stuff is just taking over our lawn! Looking for some advice, late this spring I contacted the Virginia Cooperative Extension. Through their BEST Lawns program, a master gardener visits your lawn to take soil samples for analysis. While you have your master gardener on site, pick his or her brain! Their knowledge is priceless. Then, from just a plug or two of soil from my lawn, they provided me with an extensive report about the pH balance, fertilizer needs, and treatment schedule. It was awesome. Now if they could only leave me reminder voicemails so it would get done...

My husband is counting down the times he must mow the lawn before he's done for the season. We plan on over-seeding and fertilizing as the rainy season has left parts of our lawn patchy and soggy. The master gardeners at the Horticulture Hotline said that there hasn't been a really good time to lay down grass seed because it has been too rainy. However, with the temperatures starting to drop, this may be our last weekend to do it before it's too cold for the grass to germinate.

Flowers and Bulbs
Our flowerbeds unfortunately look like the land of the dead- our Black-Eyed Susans, cone flowers and daylilies, which once stood tall, bright and beautiful, are just sad dead stalks. While these are all perennials and will come back just as beautiful next year, we must cut them back, and rake out the beds while we’re at it.

This leaves our flowerbeds empty, so off to the nursery I go. Pansies and mums are the flowers of choice for the season. I'm suckered by the colorful mums every season, but I've always been disappointed by their short bloom time. Cassie Willoughby, the nursery manager at Lake Ridge Nursery, to the rescue. "Mums are perennials," she tells me. "If planted in the ground, they will come back- just cut them back once the blooms die off."

Pansies provide the longest bloom time and can keep blooming into the winter season. A biannual flower, pansies will hang around until it gets really cold, and then they'll perk back up when the temperature starts to warm in the early spring. My pansies tend to get stringy and unruly, but this can be prevented by “dead-heading" the flowers. Cassie explained that dead-heading is cutting off the flower, just above where the first leaves appear on the stem, after the bloomed have died. Don't wait too long because once it forms a seed, the plant won't grow another bloom. She also shared that if you "cut the pansies back to a couple of inches they'll grow full again.” So, my pansies don't need to hit the compost heap, just trim and wait.

Now that the dead plants are cleared from your beds, this is also the right time to plant bulbs. Most of the big box home stores have their bags of tulip, daffodil, and hyacinth bulbs out front for you to buy. Planting bulbs now will ensure a colorful welcome for spring.

One other popular purchase at the nursery this time of year is ornamental cabbages. While these are not edible, these plants are bluish-green and some purple in the center. These annuals love cold weather, so they should last you through the winter.

Trees and Shrubs
Fall is the perfect time to inspect your trees. Tree limbs that may have grown over the summer should be pruned to keep them away from the house so they don't cause damage should we have a heavy snowfall this winter. Make sure the base of your trees are healthy, and any trees that are losing leaves way before their neighbors may be telling you they aren't doing so well- better to take care of them now, instead of falling victim to inclement weather.

Cassie warned that you should beware of pruning flowering trees and shrubs such as azaleas, camellias, and dogwoods right now. These trees and shrubs bloom on last season's growth, so if you cut them, you'll be cutting off the blooms. The best time to prune flowering trees is after they bloom in the late spring.

So, we may not have enough daylight hours to accomplish it all, but some hard yard work this fall will pay off for months to come. I may have a green thumb yet!

If you have any horticulture questions, the Horticulture Hotline, 703-792-7747, is there for you! There is a volunteer master gardener (they know their stuff) available Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Garden center and nursery staff should also be able to help you decide what plants will do best in your green space. The Lake Ridge Nursery is a fun place to visit these days. Not only do they have a great selection of mums, pansies and pumpkins, but they also have their open where kids can play and bounce for hours. The patch will be open through Halloween, Monday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sundays 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Adults are free.