GARDENING: It may be fall, but the time is ripe for planting
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October is for planting. Now is the best time of the year for planting trees, shrubs or lawns. Not palms, however. They should be planted when it's hot. Winter vegetables and winter bedding plants should have been planted at least a month ago.
Sprinkler systems for lawns should not be operating every day. Drip or bubblers used for irrigating trees and shrubs should not be operating daily, either. This is unhealthy for plants.
Right now is an excellent time to try increasing the number of days between irrigations. Try going at least two or three days between irrigations for lawns and drip irrigating deeply (a long time) once a week on woody plants.
Late fall is a wrap-up month. Most everything is centered on putting plants to rest for the winter, really cutting back on irrigations, mulching and sanitation. Getting rid of yard waste, preferably by composting or disposing of it, is important for disease and insect control for next year.
This time of year, plants are preparing for winter and the coming cold. Generally, we don't fertilize any plants in the fall that might grow now and be sensitive to winter cold and freezing.
If you need to fertilize, try using a foliar fertilizer since it will have a short-lived impact on the plant.
There is one other good time to fertilize coming up in November. This is called late fall fertilization and is done just before leaf drop in trees and shrubs and at Thanksgiving for lawns.
Mulch, mulch, mulch. Mulching now keeps the soil warmer into the cold months and helps get roots established.
At the orchard, our pomegranates, persimmons and pears are either ready for harvest or very close to being ready.
There are two ways to tell if pomegranate is ready to pick. One is the flower end. Is the flower end open or closed? Open is an indicator that it is nearly ready or ready.
To tell if the fruit is ready, remove a fruit and see if it is relatively easy to dislodge from the tree. If it is, then rap it soundly against a hard surface like concrete patio or sidewalk. If it splits with a hard rap against it, it is ready to harvest.
Harvest all that are in the same condition with their flower opening and color. Leave the rest and harvest over the next couple of weeks.
Pears have to be harvested before they are ripe. They will be ripened off of the tree. They are ready to harvest when the background color of the fruit changes from dark green to pea green or yellow green. The pears will usually easily separate from the tree by lifting the fruit.
Harvest and keep on the kitchen counter. If you want them to ripen together, put them in brown paper bags together and let them share the air inside the bag.
You can put in a ripening banana in if you want. The air inside the bag will be altered with a ripening gas, called ethylene, produced by many fruit.
Persimmons will grow in Las Vegas very successfully if put in a protected area and heavily mulched. Hachiya persimmon (the round one) is ripening now. Fuyu (the flat ones) are a few weeks off yet.
Are branches of your fruit trees losing leaves ahead of the rest of the tree? This is a good indicator of boring insects in the limbs and trunk. You will need to investigate.
As it is getting cold, now is the time outside critters will begin to migrate into the warm house. These might include crickets, spiders including black widow and scorpions.
It would be best to have a pesticide treatment done around the outside of the house where the foundation meets the ground. This barrier will help to stop the movement of many of these pests into the house.
Comment from Loretta regarding her bitter cucumbers that I mentioned a while back. Loretta found out that some on the same plant weren't bitter. So she peels the cuke and cuts off the first inch on each end, then cuts, slices and tastes it. Rather than pull up the whole plant and have no cukes, she keeps the vine and does the above.
Question: My canna lilies are still blooming, and my iris are still green leaves. When do I cut them back so that I don't lose the energy going into the bulb?
Answer: You won't be cutting them back for a while yet. Sit back and relax. Wait until Mother Nature gives you the signal.
The signal is they start dying back on their own. Then go ahead and finish it off, removing the foliage to a few inches above ground, dividing if necessary and replanting, and mulching. I would guess this will be sometime between late October and mid-November.
Fertilize them early in the spring with something like a rose or other type of flower fertilizer high in phosphorus.
Mulching will delay everything from happening in the spring but will allow you to water less often and improve the condition of the plant in general.
Q: My mother used to tell me to throw my coffee grounds around the plants and cultivate into the dirt because the worms liked the coffee grounds and it was good for the soil. Is this true?
A: Listen to your mother! At the orchard, we make coffee in the morning for the volunteers. Of course, we have leftover coffee grounds at the end of the work day. We distribute the coffee grounds around the fruit trees and mulch. It doesn't stay around very long and after a few warm months, you can't see them anymore.
I have never done any soil testing or composting with it so I had to check around with some other university sources that have.
I can't say that I have seen any differences in the trees but we keep our trees pretty healthy, anyway.
Coffee grounds, after they have been used for brewing, have about 2 percent nitrogen in them, much like a composted manure or lawn clippings.
Coffee grounds have about the same amount of available nitrogen as other kitchen scraps.
I have been told that there also is a substantial portion of available bean oil which breaks down slowly over time. Coffee grounds are acidic so that would be a good thing in our alkaline soils.
There are some pretty incredible accounts out there about how "miraculous" coffee grounds are, including breaking down crankcase oils and other contaminants.
I would be a bit skeptical of some of these accounts unless it was actually documented. However, I have seen multiple accounts about how much earthworms like coffee grounds. Too many accounts to dismiss.
In fact, Washington's Master Gardeners found that to be entirely true. I guess this is some type of worm manna and from it the worms produced excellent compost.
They did have some problems with fruit flies in closed composting bins but in our climate, I don't think that would be a problem except in the cooler months.
Coffee grounds compost had a carbon to nitrogen ration of 20-to-1 which is ideal for composts. They tested it using three types of composting bins such as an enclosed bin made of recycled plastic, wire-stacking bins and a large round wire-holding bin. They all worked well there.
The typical problem I see when Las Vegans build composting pits or bins is putting them in direct sunlight. They don't need any more energy than the nutrients which are placed in there so added sunlight energy is unnecessary and inhibitory to the making of compost.
The added energy from direct sunlight and wind will just dry out the compost faster and make it hard to keep it active.
Remember, if you are adding coffee grounds directly to the soil, it should be added with a wood source such as sawdust, wood chips, shredded paper and the like. Don't add it straight to your plants.
Bob Morris is a horticulture specialist with the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension.
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