Watering, harvesting, foraging, pruning, autumn planting. What does late summer-early fall mean for the garden or your plants and trees?

Horticulturalist Erica Jo Shaffer was on The Spark Wednesday and said that trees may need more water than a lawn at this time of year,"If you see that your trees are already starting to lose leaves or show autumn color, that means they're stressed out from not having enough water. And they're starting to respond to that by losing some of the leaves that would be requiring water. So water your trees. It's so important. Your lawn is going to be fine."

Shaffer said mature trees need about an inch of water a week.

Shaffer indicated that you start a vegetable garden now, even though temperatures will get cool soon.,"You can start again, you can start lettuce seeds again. These are the things that like cooler temperatures. So we're going to go to cooler. I harvested my own lettuce for Christmas dinner four years ago. Yeah, you can buy little frost claws. And when it was over 32 degrees, I'd pull the cloth back. And when it wasn't, I'd leave the cloth on. There was snow on it and I pulled it back and was able to harvest lettuce. So you can do lettuce, you can do beets, you can do carrots."

Autumn is a good time to maintain a lawn too Shaffer explained,"The fertilizer should be higher in the second number, which is for roots. If you go put a high nitrogen fertilizer on your lawn right now, it promotes top growth and we want to promote root growth. We want it to get situated. If you have an aerated your lawn in a in a long time, it's nice to aerate."

Support WITF: https://www.witf.org/support/give-now/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.