Planting
- Order seeds for cool season vegetables like broccoli, carrots, kale, and radishes.
- Spruce up doorstep or patio containers with water-wise succulents and trailing sedums.
Maintenance
- Check container plants daily.
- As temperatures rise, adjust your automatic irrigation system to water more often if allowed by your water district.
- Pinch the top pair of chrysanthemum shoots no longer than 5 inches to keep plants healthy.
- Cut canna stems to the ground as they finish flowering. New stems will continue to appear.
- Dig and divide overcrowded bulbs when the foliage dies off.
- Deadhead daylilies, roses, and other bloomers as they finish flowering.
- Fertilize roses.
- Cut back lavender after flowering to promote a second bloom.
- Prune wisteria to increase flowering next spring. Cut each shoot back to within 6 inches of main branches.
- Trim faded crape myrtle flowers for more fall bloom.
- Harvest vegetables promptly to encourage continued production.
- Cut spent berry canes to the ground; tie up and fertilize new canes.
- Monitor and deeply irrigate fruit and ornamental trees every other week to ensure root zone is constantly moist (soil should be moist to a depth of two feet).
- Prune deciduous fruit trees as soon as they are done producing to help keep trees smaller and fruit within arms’ reach.
Pest and disease control
- Pick up dropped fruit to prevent brown rot and reduce driedfruit beetles.
- Control codling moth to protect apple and pear fruit from this worm.
- Clean around trees.