1. September Gardening Hint: A prolonged dry spell brings special concerns about plant water needs. (September, 2002)
2. Alpines as Drought-tolerant Plants. (September 2, 2003)
3. Trees for Drought, Salt Tolerance and Resistance to Verticullum Wilt Disease (August 24, 2005)

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Articles

September Gardening Hint: A prolonged dry spell brings special concerns about plant water needs. (September, 2002)

One of the prime chores between now and freeze-up is to help your perennials and shrubs prepare for overwintering. Perennials should not receive fertilizer from now to season’s end. Plant growth should be allowed to wind down as daylight hours shorten.

Watering perennial beds and shrubs should however be high on your gardening agenda. Overwintering plants, especially shrubs and trees, need to be well supplied with moisture to withstand desiccation conditions brought on by winter winds and frozen soils. Soils are very dry right now and many plants are likely to be on the edge of their survival ability unless they are allowed to recuperate during the cooler fall growing weeks.

Supplemental watering now gives drought-stressed plants the ability to generated storage energy for successful overwintering. Water your gardens deeply (about an inch of water/watering) at one week intervals until fall rains arrive. How do you measure an inch (2.5 cm.) of moisture? We use one of our kids’ old frizzbees! Just lay it (or some other convenient container) in the garden and time how long it takes to fill the frizzbee (or your container) to the one inch level. Then water the rest of your gardens for the same length of time. Phil recently purchased a very simple no-battery type water timer from The Home Depot (no endorsement intended) that attaches to the hose line. For us, one hour of watering equals 1 inch of water. We set the timer and come back whenever our agenda or memory permits. Then the sprinkler gets shifted to the next area in need of water.

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Alpines as Drought-tolerant Plants. (September 2, 2003)

In the last email I neglected to point out that many (most actually) alpine plants thrive best in drought-prone, well-drained, gravel-based soils. This will not be news to members of the Ottawa Valley Rock Garden Society. The list of drought-resistant plants just got much longer. There are hundreds of alpine plant varieties that will grow in this area that require very little additional knowledge (or work). In fact many of them will grow on a simple pile of gravel dumped on your property and you can call it a 'garden'!

Why not visit the local Rock Garden Society's web site and consider some of the simple requirements of alpines (or rock garden plants as they are commonly called). Click here to visit their site and get info on their meetings and activities.

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Trees for Drought, Salt Tolerance and Resistance to Verticullum Wilt Disease (August 24, 2005)

Two more of our old roadside maples are unfortunately marked for removal this fall. They are showing signs of both old age and Maple Verticullum Wilt - a fungal disease that clogs up their water conducting cells. (Click here for a good article on the disease plus other plants that act as alternate hosts for the fungus.) We, in a happy cooperation with the City of Ottawa tree department, are getting on with the chore so that we can phase our tree replacement program over a few years rather than go roadside-treeless in the near future.

Our roadside replacements won't be maples as they are known to be neither drought nor salt tolerant and don't like the compacted soil associated with our driveways, city roadways and well-tromped lawns. We are in the process of deciding what trees we'll plant.

In researching info for this email, I came across a very informative document, from Colorado, which lists trees and shrubs water drought tolerance. Click here for that PDF document. By clicking here you can also obtain the following documents:

• General tree watering recommendations  (pdf)
• Tree watering devices Spring/Summer watering times (pdf)
• Tree watering devices Fall/Winter  watering times (pdf)
• Caring for trees in dry climates  (pdf)
• Planting trees and shrubs in dry climates (pdf)
• Shrub watering recommendations (pdf)