August Santa Fe Gardens

August 14, 2015 By Kendall McCumber

Well, wow. Sometimes I’m so tired at this time of year that I hardly can keep up with what is going on in the garden. So much changes every day and it’s a battle to keep up with pruning, harvesting and attention to detail, but worth every minute of the battle.

I’m glad to report that both my cherry and ash tree are totally green again. This is thanks to heavy doses of Ferriplus about a month ago, and I mean about ten times the recommend doses, mixed and dumped from a watering can over and over for half an hour. It took about two weeks, but things are totally back to normal. My goal is to fix these iron deficiency prone trees before they leaf out next year.

I’m also amazed, over and over, that the hail devastated gardens came back. It was like a harsh pruning job.

We continue to feed our containers every other week, usually with Age Old. Many perennials had to be cut back, but some we leave on the stalks for show. One time we left the hollyhocks and we got a report that the garden looked overgrown, so we stick with the smaller things. I’m proud to report there are still daisies, catmint, penstemons, winecups, California poppies, and much more are still giving us color. Roses keep plugging along too.

I also fed my tomatoes and herbs with Age Old a few weeks ago. As there are lots of tomatoes but they just aren’t ripe, I have backed off on that. For now I am giving the tomatoes time and watching to make sure they don’t get too much or too little water and that is it. I wish there was more I could do, but nature is nature. Meanwhile we are enjoying chard, cilantro, onions and potatoes.

As for the fruit, if you are looking for fruit in mid August, I recommend adding some strawberries to your mix. Just now tasty ones are coming in to the gardens, as are raspberries. Some varieties of peaches are showing themselves too, while others remain hard. We are aloo looking forward to our apples, which are coming along for the first time in three years.

Mostly now the challenges in the garden are to keep up on the dead heading and weeding. The rain has brought us such and abundant year that my friend from New Jersey said that my yard almost didn’t look like Santa Fe. I don’t mind the lushness but I still love the Santa Fe look. It’s been a great year for seeding native lawns and a lot of people are enjoying the tree growth for privacy. It’s hard to believe that the summer will ever end, but it will. So enjoy it now.