February 2007

Try the Perennial Plant Association’s Perennial Plant of the Year, Nepeta Walker’s Low. This catmint has blue-violet flowers and is long-blooming. It has an attractive grey-green foliage, few insect and disease problems and is easy to maintain. It grows 30 to 36 inches tall and as wide. Grows best in full sun. Fact sheet available-773-233-0476.

Consider one of the new 'garden friendly’ roses for your flower garden. These new roses are hardy, disease resistant and low maintenance.

• Polar Joy is a tree rose with pink blooms. It is hardy to Zone 4 without winter protection and grows four to eight feet tall. It is resistant to powdery mildew and blackspot.
• Little Mischief is a shrub rose with a mounding habit that grows three feet tall. The deep pink flowers bloom from early summer to late fall. It takes a hard freeze to knock them down.
• Kiss Me a grandiflora, has double pink blooms with a very strong rose scent. It blooms all summer and is disease resistant.
• Moondance the 2007 Floribunda of the Year has large cream-white blooms and grows three to four feet tall. It has a raspberry-like fragrance.

Rejuvenate old overgrown, deciduous shrubs like lilacs, privets, forsythia and spireas by cutting them back within 4 to 6 inches of the ground in late winter. This will produce a lot of new growth during the growing season. You may want to delay pruning of spring flowering shrubs until after they bloom.

For general pruning of trees and shrubs, remove any dead or diseased branches. Remove all water sprouts and suckers. Water sprouts are stems that grow at right angles to the branches. Suckers grow from the base of the tree. Prune out crossing or rubbing branches. Prune back to a bud or a branch. When cutting back to a bud, make sure the bud is facing outward. This will cause new growth to grow to the outside of the plant.

Houseplants need very little if any fertilizer during short winter days. Even between March and September they need to be fertilized only once every one to three months. Over fertilization can burn roots and damage plants. Use a commercial fertilizer labeled for houseplants with a 5-10-5 or 10-20-10 ratio. Slow release fertilizers are available for houseplants and will last three to four months. Follow label directions.

Save the mesh bags that oranges come in and use them next summer to dry herbs and gourds. Save pantyhose to enclose individual veggies like melons, corn, cabbage, cucumbers and small pumpkins to protect from birds and insects. Tie the pantyhose off at both ends of the veggie to keep insects out. The pantyhose will stretch with growth and dry off quickly after rain.

Limit the use of salt this winter to high traffic areas around your home like steps and sidewalks. Instead of using sodium chloride, use the less harmful calcium chloride. To reduce your use of salt, mix it with kitty litter or sand. Salts that accumulate in the soil can cause leaf scorch, yellow foliage and early fall color in trees and shrubs during the growing season.

Check out the new University of Illinois Extension Blog, 'Emerald Ash Borer in Illinois’ at http://web.extension.uiuc.edu/cook/blogs/eb104/index.html.
This site has all the latest information on this very serious threat to the ash trees in Illinois.