Fall is all that and more in the garden
Fall is one of my favorite times of year with the crisp, cool mornings and evenings, a little rain and still comfortable sunny days.
Our spring bedding plants are bouncing back from the summer heat and putting on a final flourish of flowers. The cool evenings produce our brightest and most intense flower colors of the growing season.
Reds are redder, pinks are pinker and purples and blues are brighter. We are seeing the first signs of fall color on some of our trees and shrubs, and those will get more intense in the weeks ahead as the days get shorter and the nights get cooler.
The next several weeks are the best time of the year to plant tall fescue, annual or perennial ryegrass if you want a green winter lawn or need to establish a cover crop on exposed soil.
You can overseed the tall fescue or rye over your existing Bermuda or other summer lawn, and it will produce a green lawn through the winter and early spring and yield to your Bermuda or established summer grasses as the temperatures heat up next spring.
If you are building a new home or have a bare lot, you can sow fescue or rye to prevent erosion and soil blowing and to help create that lived-in look. Do not use any pre-emergent weed killer in the couple of months before sowing new grass seed.
Hardy mums are the featured attraction of many Oklahoma gardens in October. You can buy hardy mums at your local garden center or nursery in many sizes ready to make an immediate color splash.
Some varieties are already in full bloom while others are just showing color at the flower buds. Some will finish flowering before our first freeze while other varieties will flower well into November or our first really hard freeze.
You can buy hardy mums from 1 gallon to bushel-basket size for immediate impact in red, bronze, pink, yellow, lavender, orange or white flowers.
While at the garden center
this is a good time to shop for spring flowering bulbs like tulips, hyacinth, daffodils, crocus and many other specialty bulbs. Plant them in sunny welldrained areas to root and grow through the winter and to welcome next spring with their delightful flowers.
This is prime planting season for trees and shrubs. Fall-planted trees and shrubs will go ahead and root into their new home through the winter. They will be established by spring and can handle the stress of our summer heat better.
Don’t forget to water these new tree and shrub plantings periodically through the winter to help them grow and to avoid dehydration during our cold dry winters.
This is also the time to plant pansies or ornamental kale and cabbage for late-fall and winter color.
Pansies are one of my favorite flowers because they bloom and add excitement to the garden when few other flowers are in color. Pansies are so tough they will flower right through winter snow and ice.
Pansies have cute and flirty flower faces that add to their winter charm. You can select pansies in a multitude of solid colors like blue, yellow, red, purple, bronze or white, but my favorites are the multicolored flowers where the bottom petals are one color and the top petals are another color. These multicolored pansy flowers really do look like flower faces.
Add a little blood meal fertilizer as you plant your pansies. Water after planting and during winter dry spells and sit back and enjoy them planted along your sidewalks, in featured flower beds or large decorative containers. They make small mounds of flowers 6 inches to 10 inches tall.
Ornamental kale and cabbage provide large colorful foliage to decorate your late fall and winter garden. They grow 12 to 18 inches tall. They are not quite as winter hardy as pansies and may make it though the full winter to melt in the heat next spring or could succumb to long stretches of really low temperatures during the winter.
Fall weather is a great time to spend time outside in your yard and garden. Select a few projects and have fun as you get fit and beautify your yard.
Rodd Moesel serves as president of Oklahoma Farm Bureau and was inducted into the Oklahoma Agriculture Hall of Fame. Email garden and landscape questions to rmoesel@americanplant.com.