What to know about gardening in Pennsylvania in early summer weeks
-
Scott LaMar
Airdate: Tuesday, June 27, 2023
It’s late June, the weather is getting warmer and South Central Pennsylvania has finally gotten some much needed rain over the past week. So, what should you be doing with your vegetable garden, flowers or lawns?
Horticulturist Erica Jo Shaffer, who appears regularly on The Spark, had this quick advice at this point in time,”Keep your things dead headed, which means removing your old flowers. We’ve got the day lilies coming in, your German bearded irises right now. You could cut down to an inch high. The foliage will come back. That removes the iris borers again. Watch your trees, water your trees. If we don’t get rain, don’t water at night, because then the foliage stays wet and you might get fungal problems.”
Erica Jo Shaffer and Scott LaMar
Shaffer said tomato plants may be a little behind, depending on how much water they got, but she added a pest has been a problem for tomatoes this year,”The aphids have been just awful this year, so you might find that the tops of your tomato plants are getting all kind of weird and distorted and crunchy looking. So you can use insecticidal soap or Neem and E.M. Oil, which will just smother and suffocate them without putting a chemical poison on your tomato plants. We used to use seven, like seven dust. Seven dust kills all insects, bees, ladybugs, ladybug larva, like all the good things (we need).
This comes at a time when a new national report finds 87% of Americans are gardening in some way this year but one in six kill every plant they try to grow. That survey found 52% blame lack of knowledge for problems they have in the garden while 60% say it is neglect.
Shaffer said misinformation is a real issue,”Like they’re saying a plant gets two feet tall when really it gets 20 feet tall. Or they say that you need to water something all the time or it’s misidentified. Even on my iPhone app, sometimes people will send me screenshots and say, Hey, my phone told me this is what this plant is. And really probably about two out of every five. It’s not even that plant. So, there’s just so much so much misinformation.”
