The July gardener’s to-do list

By Don Davis
Published: July 1, 2008

As July begins, there are two good reasons to be outdoors in the heat and humidity: to grow some food and take care of your yard.

The tasks at hand will be affected, in part, by conditions, which tend to be drier and to cause everyone to hope for more rain.

Tomatoes are ripening in local gardens this month, and some of them look rotten on the bottom. This is blossom end rot, caused by poor uptake of calcium by tomato roots under dry conditions. You can fix the problem by mulching and watering on a regular basis (weekly for most tomatoes).

Remember to feed your tomato vines on a regular basis. You can do it by scattering dry fertilizer on the ground once a month or by using soluble fertilizer in water once a week.

The onions and potatoes you planted in early spring are ready to harvest this month. Be sure to get them out of the ground before they rot or are eaten by rodents. Onion bulbs are fully mature when onion leaves flop over on to the ground. If your onion plants put up a flower stalk and go to seed, there will be no bulbs.

Space is left empty when you harvest the early crops, and it must be used for another crop or weeds will take over. Some of the vegetables to plant in July are bean, squash and cucumber. Be sure to fertilize with nitrogen before replanting, as this nutrient is rapidly depleted in gardens.

Flowering plants need deadheading to look their best. Use scissors or pruning shears to snip off faded flowers and seed heads on a weekly schedule. Deadheading is particularly important for roses, although there are some low-maintenance rose varieties, such as Knockout, which thrive on neglect. Be sure to deadhead your zinnias, marigolds and cannas to promote continuous blooming.

July is not a major pruning season, unless you are thinking about hydrangeas. The old-fashioned, blue-flowered bigleaf hydrangeas are pruned in July, if at all. They begin blooming in June and need to be pruned soon thereafter, so that flower buds for next year can have time to develop.

Lawns will need mowing as long as there is rainfall to cause growth, and the best advice on mowing is to mow high. Cutting your grass at a height of three or four inches will help it survive the heat of summer. If severe drought sets in and your grass begins turning brown, stop mowing altogether.

Wiregrass is a deep-rooted perennial weed, which spreads by stolons, rhizomes and seeds. Here are the steps to follow for wiregrass (common Bermuda grass) control in fescue/bluegrass/ryegrass lawns.

—Let the wiregrass grow for three to four weeks. It will absorb more weed killer if it has plenty of leaves.
—Spray your wiregrass with a two percent solution of glyphosate (Roundup, Killzall, etc.) at the end of July. Repeat at the end of August. No other weed killer is effective on this weed, and you can expect it to kill your lawn along with the weeds.

—The treated lawn area will have no living vegetation by the middle of September. That is the time to prepare a seedbed and replant your lawn. To get ready for that, you could have your soil tested now.