Why you need to dunk your plants right now
The gardening season is over. Almost.
My trees are bare, perennials are going brown and shrivelled, the vegetable plot is cleaned out, the garlic planted. Now, when I get up most mornings, there’s frost on the Sedum Autumn Joy. It looks like icing sugar sprinkled on cinnamon muffins and reminds me what a mixed blessing this particular Sedum is — quite ugly in summer, with its weird broccoli-like flower sprays in lurid pink, but by fall, transformed to the warm hue of Victorian sofas — and pleasing to the eye.
Yet soon the heavy artillery of winter will roll in, and blanket everything, including my stalwart Sedums, in great mounds of white. Thus, this is always a bittersweet time, when we northern gardeners reflect on the past year, what worked and what didn’t, and the sobering reality that long, tedious cold months lie ahead before we’re outside again, eagerly inspecting our plants for signs of spring.
Yet the arrival of November brings immense relief too. No more weeding, no more fretting about weird caterpillars chewing holes in the dahlias, no more whacking back unruly shrubs, no more feeling guilty that we should be “doing something in the garden” instead of relaxing with a bottle of vino and a good book.
Those treats lie ahead, indoors, but there is one gardening chore left in my garden: giving frost-tender potted plants a bath, before they come inside. Mine are dwindling in number now (due to increasingly creaky knees, which can no longer cope with hauling heavy containers down into the basement).
Yet like all longtime gardeners, I cherish a few faves that are impossible to part with. There’s my beloved bay laurel tree (at least a decade old, and constantly barbered to keep it manageable), a rosemary bush (rather ratty now), the best summer bulb I’ve ever grown (Eucomis, or pineapple plant, which flourishes in the same pot every summer), a collection of callas and three recently acquired fig trees. And having endured the nightmare of white fly, mealy bugs and ghastly, thread-like worms hatching out in their pots during past winters, I now take the trouble to wash them all. Because it definitely does kill live bugs and eggs that are lurking in the soil. Here’s how to do it:
On a warm day, give each plant a drastic haircut, then dunk the whole thing, pot and all, into a deep plastic hamper filled with lukewarm water and a few generous squirts of a mild soapy solution. (Don’t use detergent or regular dishwashing liquid. I recommend Nature Clean, a Canadian product that won’t harm plants or roots.)
Make sure the whole plant is immersed and leave for a few minutes until bubbles rise. Then change the water and dunk the containers again. (For big ones, rinse the soil with a garden hose.) Leave them to dry in the sun for a bit before hauling indoors.
This routine has, I find, an unexpected bonus: It gives thirsty container plants (which often get dry as a bone during summer) a good drink before their long sojourn inside our too-warm homes. So they’re more likely to survive.
And trust me, folks. It works. soniaday.com