Category: Outdoors

We’ve already had some chilly nights here in Cornish Flat, New Hampshire. Frost is still a long way off, but a few leaves are already turning and I’m thinking about my fall chores and getting a few done now. Let’s take a look at some chores you might wish to add to your list.

First, have a good look at your lawn. If you have bare spots or areas where your grass is thin, this is a good time to “over-seed” those places. You’ll be helped by temperatures that are cooler and rain that is usually more frequent.

I recently called Paul Sachs, a lawn expert and the owner of North Country Organics, a Vermont-based organic fertilizer producer. Paul suggested scratching up the area that needs help with a rake, sprinkling some seed over the area and tamping it down to ensure good contact with the soil. I use a metal tamper that does this well: it is a thick metal plate 8 inches square on a 4-foot handle. Lift it a few inches, drop it. Thud. Done.

Lawn seed needs light to germinate, so don’t cover your seed with soil. You can mulch lightly with straw to shade it and reduce evaporation. Seed needs to be kept lightly moist in order to germinate. In hot dry times, water daily. I generally use a “conservation mix” for the seed — it’s a good mixture of grass types. Paul Sachs told me you can over-seed through the end of October. I say do it sooner rather than later, preferably right after a rain.

If you haven’t harvested your potatoes yet, do so soon. If they have bloomed or if the leaves are yellowing and dying back it is time to do so. Try to avoid damaging your potatoes when digging. If your soil is loose and fluffy, you can tug gently on the main stem while loosening soil from around the plant with your other hand. If your soil is heavy, push your shovel into the ground at a 45-degree angle to get well under the plant, and pry upward. Potatoes store best unwashed and cured in the shade for a couple of days before going in a storage fridge or a cool, dark basement. Mice love potatoes, so make sure they can’t get to them.

Recently I planted another batch of lettuce, and I recommend you do, too. Lettuce seeds need sunlight to germinate, so you shouldn’t cover them with too much soil. A sprinkling of agricultural vermiculite (instead of soil) works fine. But if you plant seeds directly in the ground and you press down the seeds, it can form a little gully that fills up with soil when watering. I did that once this year and got only three seeds to germinate in a double 4-foot row. (Shame on me, I know better.) When I planted seeds in my waist-tall raised growing bed I was able to water gently and had germination in five days! I thinned out some seedlings and replanted, but I need to thin the rows some more.

Fall is a good time to move things around in the garden, including trees and shrubs. Scientists have determined that woody plants extend their roots after leaf drop in the fall. If you transplant now, be sure to water daily for the first week or so, and at least weekly after that, or more often if it’s hot and dry.

I recently dug a mature honeyberry shrub (Lonicera caerulea) and gave it to some new friends. It was about 5 feet wide and 30 inches tall. It had provided birds with nice snacks in early summer, but I got only a few berries since birds eat them earlier than I do, and I refuse to use netting.

I pushed a long shovel (sold as The Root Slayer) into the soil and pried up the soil all the way around. I tried to get the shovel under the middle of the plant from all four sides before gently lifting it and placing it on a tarp we used for moving it to my friend’s truck. Fortunately honeyberry has no tap root, which would have made the digging more difficult. Oaks (and most nut trees) grow deep tap roots making transplanting difficult after their first year and requiring severing the tap root.

This is a good time to do a little planning: If you plan to plant spring-blooming bulbs or garlic, buy or order them soon. Seed garlic often sells out long before planting time in October. Visit your local farmers market or gardening center to buy garlic now unless you plan to sacrifice some of this year’s harvest for planting.

Lastly, take a walk around your property and ask yourself, “Do I really like this plant? Should I pull it and replace it with something else?” I’ve run out of space in my garden, so I am doing that now and sharing plants with friends to make space for new plants.

Henry has been gardening in Cornish Flat since he bought his home in 1970. You can reach him at henry.homeyer@comcast.net or PO Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746.

By mid-August many of us have sighed with relief and settled into a comfy chair in the shade. Planting is done. Weeds? Either under control or not going to be controlled until Jack Frost comes along. We pick our tomatoes, fill a few vases with late bloomers and generally relax. But this is a good time to work on controlling invasive plants. Let’s look at a few of the culprits and what we might do. Three shrubs or small trees I have been working on are buckthorn, multiflora rose and bush honeysuckle.

Buckthorn is difficult to eradicate because if you just cut it down, the roots send up dozens of new plants. If you are patient, you can double girdle a trunk with a small folding saw, cutting through the bark and green layer beneath it but not cutting into the core wood beneath that. This prevents the leaves from feeding the roots, starving them. I’ve done this, but generally it takes three years to kill the tree. No new shoots come from it. But I’m 80 now and don’t want to wait three years.

So what have I been doing? Digging out the plants, roots and all. It’s slow but generally doable. I shall see next spring if the inevitable fragments of roots left in the soil send up new shoots. But if they do, they should be easier to get out. I am working on plants no more than an inch and a half in diameter at the base.

I start with my CobraHead weeder, raking through the soil, exposing roots and teasing them out. I then rock the main stem to loosen up the roots some more, and I try to get roots exposed on one side and pull them out of the ground, then tip the small tree over the other way. I then get a long shovel under the center of the tree and try to pry it up. If there are deep roots going straight down, I slice them off and try to dig them out after I have removed the tree and the surface roots.

Buckthorns are showing ripe fruit in my neighborhood right now — dark shiny berries that have a pit like a small cherry in the middle. Birds eat them and excrete the seeds, starting new plants. Common buckthorn has male and female plants, and only the females have berries. Glossy buckthorn is self-pollinating, so all produce fruit. I have a male common buckthorn and although it has not made fruit it has sent up about three dozen root sprouts in a radius of 6 feet or so, all interconnected.

Most trees have either alternate or opposite branching of leaves and branches. Not the buckthorns; they have “sub-opposite” branching. Twigs are not quite opposite on the branches, one just a little below the other. That’s a good way to help identify buckthorns.

Multiflora roses (Rosa multiflora) were introduced by the USDA in the 1930s for use in erosion control and as living fences. They were used by highway departments in the 1960s in divided highways as crash barriers and a way to screen headlight glare. Unfortunately, they escaped and became a dreadful noxious invasive. They can strangle trees and make it impossible to walk through areas where they have taken over.

Birds introduced multiflora roses to my property just a few years ago. I had seen it elsewhere and knew it, so I began digging it out before it became a serious problem. But it will be on my “to do” list, I fear, till the day I die. I have found its roots spread far and wide, and the thorns are dreadful. This is a job to hire out if you can find someone willing to take it on, and must be done every year.

I try to at least cut it back before animals spread the seeds found in the rose hips. Digging it out is a “later in the fall” project for me so I can wear heavy canvas jeans, jacket and gloves. The roots, in my experience, are not particularly deep. However, that may vary according to the type of soil you have. Digging out roots is always easiest when the soil is moist, not dry.

There are many species of honeysuckle, both native and foreign invasive that grow in New England; of these, four bush honeysuckle are invasive. If you have honeysuckle and didn’t plant it, it probably is one of the invasive ones. I have honeysuckle as a problem plant at the edges of my property. Right now it is displaying juicy red berries that have three small hard seeds inside. If you cut the stem, it has a hollow center, or a dark area at the center.

In my experience digging up a honeysuckle is much easier than getting out a buckthorn or multiflora rose. This is due, in part, to the fact that the roots seem to stay closer to the surface and can be exposed by digging with my CobraHead weeder. Sometimes they break when I pull on them, and I don’t really know if those bits will create new plants. I will mark where the honeysuckles were pulled, and revisit the sites where they were growing next spring to see if new plants are growing.

The list of invasives is long but most gardens have some of them. Both New Hampshire and Vermont have good websites with complete lists. New Hampshire will identify invasives for you from photos you send in. The most important things to do are to learn about your invasives, and to work every year to remove some.

Removing invasives is hard work but very satisfying. I recommend getting rid of root systems and fruit in household trash or in your fireplace — never in your compost pile, where they may survive and thrive.

Henry’s column appears twice monthly. Reach him at henry.homeyer@comcast.net.