Tips for getting the most out of your summer blooms

Monday is the Fourth of July. There are a lot of good growing days ahead. This is a good time to look around the landscape and garden and do a bit of summer maintenance.

If you have perennials in the garden that have finished blooming, you should remove the dead flowers. We like to refer to this as "deadheading." There are a couple of benefits when doing this. It keeps the garden looking fresher, and some varieties will bloom again when the old flowers are removed.

You should also deadhead annuals if you have flowers that do not fall off. A couple of examples would be marigolds and geraniums. To increase the production of flowers, the old flowers need to be picked off.

If you have not been feeding your flowers, you should start. Annuals are fast growers and heavy feeders. You should have started feeding them when you planted them, so if you have not fed them, they are probably really hungry.

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There are different ways to feed your annuals. You can feed with a slow-release granular fertilizer. These products are formulated to release fertilizer over a long period of time. An example would be Garden-Cote from Fertilome. This fertilizer will continually feed for several months.

The annuals can also be fed with a liquid fertilizer. A great product for this is Fertilome’s Blooming and Rooting Fertilizer. This fertilizer is mixed with water. It should be used once a week as you are watering. This fertilizer is 58% phosphorus, which is the element in fertilizer that helps produce more abundant blooms.

Deadheading garden plants like these spent roses will help keep them vigorous throughout the growing season.
Deadheading garden plants like these spent roses will help keep them vigorous throughout the growing season.

You should also catch up on the weeds in the lawn and the garden. Spraying is the most effective way to eliminate weeds. For the lawn, I suggest using Weed Free Zone, also from Fertilome, because it will kill broad leaf weeds without hurting the grass.

Usually by this time of the summer there is a bumper crop of Nutsedge growing. Nutsedge is the light green grass that grows twice as fast as the turf grass. This can also be selectively controlled with a product called Sedgehammer.

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If you have weeds in your planting beds, you can take care of them with a non-selective herbicide. Examples of this would be Hi-Yield Killzall or Roundup. These products will kill the weeds without hurting the soil, but you do have to spray carefully to avoid the foliage of any desirable plants.

When you are spraying weed killer at this time of the season, you should pay attention to the temperature. Avoid spraying when the temperature is above 90 degrees because when it is this hot, the stomates (pores in the foliage) close to conserve moisture. When they are closed, herbicides cannot be absorbed into the weeds.

If you have a substantial amount of weeds in your beds, you probably did not apply any pre-emergent weed control earlier in the season. It’s never too late to use these products. If you did use a pre-emergent in the spring, you should reapply now. The longest these products last is four months, and this year it would be less because of all the rain.

You may have noticed that I frequently recommend Fertilome products. I like to recommend Fertilome products because I know they use the most current technology, and I know them to be effective and safe. This comes from my own personal use as well as the feedback I receive from customers.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Garden tips for summer annuals include deadheading, weed killer