Last call for houseplants not to be “deadplants”
Cold weather’s a-coming. We’ve already had some frosty nights, and most of our region stands a good chance of seeing a hard freeze Sunday night into Monday morning. Ideally, any overwintering houseplants are already safely back indoors — but if you still have tender plants in pots outside, get them in ASAP.
Take pest-prone plants such as hibiscus and peppers to your sink or shower and spray the leaves with sharp streams of water to remove hitchhiking aphids. Then just let them sit and stabilize. Don’t feed or prune incoming houseplants, and don’t place them near intense sunlight, cold drafts or heat vents.
Wait a few weeks before you prune off any dead branches or discolored leaves, and use a light hand with the water over winter, when most houseplants aren’t actively growing. And don’t feed houseplants, other than citrus, over the winter.
Prepare now for The Big Chill
Remember how last winter showed up for the party several hours early, catching us all unaware? Let’s prepare for that happening again — and then maybe it won’t.
- Disconnect and drain all of your outdoor hoses. Be prepared to hook them back up if you have a newly seeded lawn that might need another watering when “Indian Summer” rolls in. Otherwise, roll them up and turn the outdoor water supply off to protect your pipes.
- Locate your ice scrapers now: one for inside each car and another for inside the house.
- And remember when you couldn’t even buy a badly stained, ripped-open bag of rock salt for love or money after Dec. 1 last season? Stock up now, and you can have your pick of plant- and paver-safe ice-melting alternatives. My preference is Calcium Chloride — just a little dusting keeps your walkway safe without salting your lawn and landscape.
- Note: New lawns designed to protect the bay now forbid the use of urea and other fertilizers as a de-icer.
It’s fried green tomato time
Yes, it’s that time of year — rotting Halloween pumpkins on your porch, moldy hay bales in your yard and a garden full of green tomatoes. Now, tomatoes are tropical plants, and you can throw curtains, blankets and other bad ideas over them if that’s your idea of a good time — but they will not be growing anymore.
So call the game, pull up the plants and bring the fruits inside. Any tomato that has achieved full size will slowly ripen up indoors if you treat it correctly.
That means leaving them out in the open in a cut-down cardboard box or just out on the counter, single file. Don’t pile them on top of each other. Keep them out of direct sun and cold drafts and check them daily for leaks, tossing any bad ones into the compost before they get too stinky.
An interesting option for those who have the correct kind of space is to carefully pull up the plants and hang them, tomatoes and all, upside down in a somewhat warm garage, basement or other not-too-cold area. Then just pick them as they ripen “on the vine.” Or you can slice up the biggest, firmest ones for that essential fall treat of fried green tomatoes.
But no matter how you handle them, be sure to bring them inside before a hard freeze hits or they’ll just turn to mush and be good for nothin’.
Caring for new sod in cool weather
Kyle in Arlington writes: “We just re-sodded our lawn and I’m wondering when I should stop watering and mowing for the season.”
Well, Kyle, if you had spread seed, the answer would be to keep watering every week we don’t get adequate rain until the ground freezes.
With sod, you want to avoid over watering (after the recommended big initial multi-hour soaking right after installation) to force the roots to grow into your soil. You also want to stay off of new sod for at least two weeks after installation. Then you can test it. If it resists pulling up with a gentle tug, you can begin walking on it
