This Week's Gardening...
Crepe myrtles are great trees. They have gorgeous flowers and, when fully bloomed, look like a giant living cotton candy on a stick. They go deciduous in the winter, protecting themselves from the cold, and can stand extreme heat in the summer. In fact, they thrive on it.
While our other plants wilted and browned during this summer's most intense heat (120 degrees plus), the crepe myrtle just laughed it off and produced some more flowers.
The one drawback to them is that they're a prolific producer of suckers...stems growing from the ground around the bottom of the plant.
If you want yours to be a bush, rather than a tree, no problem. Just leave them be. But, if you're like me and want to train it into a tree, you need to get those suckers.
If left alone, you'd get a tree like this one at our local YMCA, where the suckers grow like a little bush around the bottom of the trunk.
Otherwise, you just need to go out once a week with your pruning shears and snip them off at the base.
It's not a hard job but you need to keep on top of it.
In other gardening news, I found a cluster of grapes on our vine that somehow survived that intense heat and was able to harvest it.
We're blowing out our classic vinyl LP albums at The Musick Channel Garage Sale on Ebay.
Find some bargains on great music today.
Darryl Musick
Copyright 2018 - All Rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment