The main way a plant loses moisture is through its leaves and needles, so shedding them cuts losses. What counts now is whether there’s enough life in the roots to push out new growth.
The best medicine is cooler temperatures and soaking rains — not the 3-inch-in-2-hour gully-washers we’ve had this summer. Most of that ended up in sewer pipes and creeks.
Take a close look at your hurting plants. Some already have pushed out little new leaf shoots. Others still might make a comeback in the coming weeks or next spring. That’s encouraging, but it doesn’t mean your trees are out of the woods yet (har-har).
The real test will be later next spring when plants go into prime growth gear. If the roots aren’t intact enough to supply moisture and energy for that demand, the plants will shut down. That’s when people will scratch their heads and wonder how the plant survived this summer’s heat but mysteriously died when the weather was nice.
Evergreens that have totally browned out are least likely to be born again. Most of those store moisture very well in the needles even weeks after the roots have completely died. (Think Christmas tree.) The only hope with them is that it was the intense heat rather than dried-up roots that caused them to brown.
What to do now? Water, water, water.
Keep the soil around and under all at-risk woody plants consistently damp until the ground freezes. Forget fertilizing with a potent chemical. This is survival time, not force-growth time.
Young plants are most at risk because they haven’t yet sent out enough roots to adequately mine the soil for moisture.
The first season in a new landscape is the most critical, but trees can take 3 to 5 years before they’re fully established.
It’s hard to supply enough water standing there with a hose. Most people under-estimate how much it takes to soak the soil deeply, and the rest are too impatient. Gradual and/or automatic systems are usually more reliable, such as drip-irrigation systems, Tree Gators (water-filled bags that wrap around trunks and leak water out holes) or even setting a hose to trickle and moving it around the trunk every 15 minutes or so.
One good thing we’ve got going for us is that plants do their best to survive. Here’s hoping they pleasantly surprise us.
How many ways can you kill a lawn? We’re seeing most of them this summer as legions of aggravated home-owners are breaking their backs replanting dead grass — again.
Intense heat killed off a lot of it. Dry weather and lousy soil combined to kill even more. Lately I’ve heard from folks who found chinch bugs and sod webworms feasting on lawn roots, and one of my neighbors had huge swaths of his lawn decimated by grubs.
If it’s dead anyway, this is a good time to consider replacing part of the lawn with gardens — or at least more durable groundcovers. Otherwise, rake off the dead stuff and get busy reseeding. Now through the end of October is prime time.
Nasty lawn weeds
As if everything else wasn’t bad enough in the lawn, two weeds have been moving in to capitalize on the bare spots.
One is nutsedge (sometimes called nutgrass). This yellowish grass-like plant has triangular stems and sticks up above the rest of the darker green lawn grass. The other invader is nimblewill, a wiry, grassy weed that’s green but grows in thick patches that choke out the more desirable lawn grasses.
What makes them particularly pesky is that they’re both perennials that don’t respond well to the usual broad-leaf lawn weed-killers. Botanically, they’re too close to lawn grass for those chemicals to differentiate.
To control nutsedge, you might win by pulling if you catch an outbreak early. Loosen the soil so you get the whole plant. Bulblets left behind will sprout into a new weed that survives our winters. Lawn-care professionals can apply either of two selective herbicides that aren’t readily available to homeowners (SedgeHammer and Basagran). Even these might require two or three treatments.
Homeowners can buy nutgrass-killers with MSMA, but these have to go on while plants are young and also need to be re-applied. Nimblewill can be controlled through repeated pulling, but it’s a tough competitor because of its dense, creeping habit.
If pulling doesn’t work, you’re stuck with using a kill-everything herbicide such as glyphosate (i.e. Roundup) to kill off the good with the bad. Once the ground is bare, start over with new sod or new seed.
At least this is all good exercise.