Punch List

Summer plant care

• Quality time in the landscape for some gardeners is keeping up with regular plant maintenance. Others with busy schedules let plants mingle and seed abundantly.

• Many flowering annuals, herbs and perennials like deadheading (cutting off spent blooms), pinching or pruning throughout the growing season to keep them looking tidy, prevent seed production or help with repeat blooming (if they are rebloomers).

• Other plants set attractive seed heads after blooming, including asclepias, pasque flower and liatris, so admire them all season.

• The shortlist of plants that benefit from deadheading: daisies, candytuft, Jupiter’s beard, salvia, catmint, coreopsis, daisies, penstemon, roses and daylilies. Cut the dead or declining flower and stem down to the next bud or leaf. • Trailing petunias, calibrachoas and lobelia often need a haircut midsummer if they have become leggy. Cut back half the plant if needed.

• When harvesting culinary herbs, like basil, mint, lemon balm, oregano and chives, for the kitchen, pinch the plants right above a set of leaves often to prevent blooms. Herbs that have flowered have less flavor. Or grow two clumps of your favorite herbs— let one flower and keep the other plant from flowering to use all summer.

.• Give plants a light fertilizer boost after pinching or deadheading. Water the plant first, fertilize and then water again. Fertilize early or evening, not during midday heat. • Apply fertilizer once a week to annuals, hanging baskets and containers where you are growing flowers and vegetables to compensate for nutrient leaching from frequent watering.

• It is safe to prune away dead branches on trees, shrubs (lilacs, weigelia, ninebark, etc.) and roses any time during the year. But if you have fruit trees, wait until late winter to prune.

Vegetables

• Fertilize sweet corn when it grows knee-high.

• Keep up with the harvest of fruits, berries and vegetables to promote more production.

• If vegetable soil is low in nitrogen (often the case with gardens in their first year or those low in organic matter) tomatoes may be susceptible to early blight — an early indicator is yellow-spotted lower leaves. Keep nitrogen levels up from mid to late summer to reduce chances of early blight. Fertilize lightly when tomatoes reach 2 inches in diameter using water-soluble nitrogen or dry granular sprinkled in a circle around each plant.

• Use your own tomatoes to clone new plants. With clean, sharp pruners cut 6 to 8 inches of a lowergrowing sucker (shoot that grows from the joint where a branch on the tomato plant meets a stem) or tip growth (no flowers or fruit, just leaves) on shorter maturing indeterminate varieties. Cut off the lower leaves (leave one or two leaves at the top) and place in water to grow roots or place the cutting directly in sterile potting soil, keeping it moist. Either method will root in 10 days or so for transplanting outdoors.

Bouquets

• Bring the outdoors in and fill a vase or two with fresh-cut flowers. Make the bouquet taller than the vase and use one to three of the same flower type as the focus.

• For variety and interest include greenery from non-flowering plants — ornamental grasses, rosemary, or a shrub branch or two.

• Cut early in the morning when flowers have more water in their stems. Cut at an angle (they soak up more water) and trim off any foliage below the water line.