YORKTON - Another plant sale has come and gone! The Yorkton hort society thanks all our gardening friends for coming to our plant sale last week! It‘s always great to see you and visit with you.
We’re sure you found some treasures; planting at this time of the garden year is wonderful. No stress of summer heat; soil moisture stays a little longer; plants settle in and establish new root systems. Thank you to all members of the group who donated plants, and helped with the sale in any way, and thank you also to our friends at the Parkland Mall and Yorkton This Week.
A very wise man, a gardener, once said “You can’t fix in September the mistakes you made in May.” Wise words indeed! Think about them for a moment.
At this time of the garden year, before we start pulling things out and putting things away, it is a very good idea to review what mistakes you made in May. Yes, yes, I know we all think we’ll remember…but honestly, a week or two after we empty out selected containers, can we list with certainty what was actually in them? Saying “some kind of yellow flowers” doesn’t count!
So take a little tour through your yard and make a short, point-form list of “the best of the best”, and…the rest. September successes, or May mistakes?
I’ll share some of our list with you now. In recent years we have made a real dedicated effort to plant bee-friendly plants. We are rewarded with many bees coming to our yard. Our bee garden, which contains a variety of poppies, cosmos, zinnias and bachelor buttons, is a success. But we left many borage plants, a true bee favorite, and while the bees loved to visit the delicate blue flowers, a definite plus, the plants kind of took over a certain part of the garden, a definite minus. They are robust and grow quickly, and we left many intact, probably more than we should have. That was our mistake in May. So…a note to ourselves for next year.
We had great luck with our geraniums, they gave us a lovely display of colour. The mistake in May was not getting a few more.
Osteospermum: always one of our favorites. We planted large containers of them. It may have been a May mistake, because it was difficult to always keep up with dead-heading. Difficult to fix now because it may be getting late for new blooms to come.
Container plant selections. Some were a May mistake because when we planted them, the plants were smaller and it seemed like there was lots of room…but then they did so well that some plants were dwarfed with the others. And now, in September, it is too late to fix that.
So, September note to self, allow more room.
May mistake: don’t be fooled by unmarked plants. I bought a little, tiny, diminutive tomato plant of unknown origin in May, more because I felt sorry for it than anything else…but it was so little that I was sure it was a cherry-tomato variety. I thought it would make a bonsai tomato in a container. We ended up planting it in our raised bed, and it is huge. Now, in September, it is too late to fix that error, but we certainly have a conversation piece in the garden.
The wise words “You can’t fix in September the mistakes you made in May.” are very true. Whether we talk about mistakes of over-crowding, under-crowding, not watering enough at the right time, not treating pest problems at the right time, not deadheading enough…the list goes on, but September is the time to record those items, and keep them handy for next spring. Visit the hort society at www.yorktonhort.ca Thank you to our friends at YTW for their fine work. Have a great week and enjoy the fall garden!
