Caring for your roses, tomato plants and more in the garden this week

5 things to do in the garden this week:

1. Most commercially grown roses rebloom every six to eight weeks if they are deadheaded in a timely manner. To deadhead means to remove faded blooms. On a stem where you have deadheaded a flower, cut back to the lowest five-leaflet leaf on that stem. If you have a  constantly decomposing layer of mulch under your roses, fertilization will not be necessary. However, if the ground is bare, deadheading should coincide with application of a fertilizer designed specifically for roses. On reblooming hydrangeas such as the White Wedding variety, it is also essential  to remove faded blooms in order to promote development of additional flowers.

2. If powdery mildew is plaguing your roses, a mixture of 1 part skim milk and 9 parts water can be sprayed for the abatement of this disease. Spraying weekly is recommended. Make sure that you saturate both sides of the leaves with your skim milk solution. On this same topic, I received the following email a number of years ago from Robert Wayne Steele, Sr., a gardener in West Covina. “I am a very long-time vegetable gardener,” he wrote, “and have found that whole milk, full strength in a spray bottle, will kill sucking insects (aphids, scales, mealybugs, whiteflies, thrips). I always seem to have a problem with colonies of those little suckers on the leafy greens, kale, broccoli, and cabbage especially. After a few treatments, they are greatly reduced and easy to control. It may require application every other day or so to be effective, but it does work.”

3. Grapevines provide fruit without a lot of water, but the quality of your crop will improve with a single weekly soaking. To prevent predation by birds, enclose fruit clusters in paper bags. You will need to look inside the bag from time to time to make sure you don’t forget to harvest your grapes when they are ripe. However, should your grapes ripen faster than you expected and begin to shrivel, you can still consume them as raisins. In truth, raisins that come from grapes that dry on the vine are tastier and more nutritious than those that come from grapes that are picked when ripe and then dried in the sun.

4. As your vegetables ripen, make sure you pick them, ideally in the morning when they are more hydrated than at other times of the day. The same principle that governs deadheading of flowers is at work: flowers and vegetables are sinks for the minerals and water taken up by roots as well as the sugars produced by leaves. The moment a flower has faded or a summer vegetable – tomato, eggplant, pepper, cucumber, or squash – has matured, it must be removed in order to allow new flowers and vegetables to form so that resources taken up by roots or manufactured in leaves can be allotted to them.

5. With the expense of potted, nursery-grown tomato plants going sky high, you might want to consider cloning your tomato plants. This can be done by layering, a process where you take a low-growing stem and bury eight inches to a foot of it beneath the soil surface with the terminal end exposed. After around a month, the buried portion of the stem should have created roots so that you can detach it from the mother plant and have it grow on its own after digging a hole whose depth matches the length of roots that have formed. Alternatively, you can take a tomato cutting at least ten inches long, strip off all the leaves except for a few on the terminal end of the cutting, and plant it in a hole whose depth is equal to the length of the leafless stem portion. Make sure you keep the soil moist until you see new growth begin.

Please send questions and comments to joshua@perfectplants.com.