August marks shift in season
This is the season of sales. Back to school sales, car sales,
home sales and, yes, holiday sales. I have seen my first Christmas
display and I am truly shocked.
For gardeners and do-it-yourselfers, August marks the changeover
season with its numerous clearance sales. You can find plants,
shrubs, trees, outdoor furniture, barbecue grills, patio lighting,
statuary, and an assortment of sprays and fertilizer all at a
savings.
August marks shift in season
This is the season of sales. Back to school sales, car sales, home sales and, yes, holiday sales. I have seen my first Christmas display and I am truly shocked.
For gardeners and do-it-yourselfers, August marks the changeover season with its numerous clearance sales. You can find plants, shrubs, trees, outdoor furniture, barbecue grills, patio lighting, statuary, and an assortment of sprays and fertilizer all at a savings.
Whether it is a good savings or a bad savings depends on what you buy, and what other retailer garden centers and nurseries are offering to clear their aisles in preparation for fall-winter merchandise. Bags of charcoal give way to boxes of three-hour logs, and summer annuals are replaced by wildflower seeds and spring-flowering bulbs.
Still, it is easy to be seduced by 50 percent savings and two-for-one sales. Before whipping out your credit card, consider these things.
Buy cautiously. Ask yourself, what is the lifeline of this particular plant? You will find pots of tomato plants, late-blooming summer annuals and started pots of vegetable such as corn and squash. But none of these are particularly good, regardless of the reduced price.
At this point in summer, all summer vegetables, particularly tomatoes, are at their season end, too far gone to put in new plants. You might, and this is a big might, get one or two or three ripe tomatoes, but that is unlikely even if the plant has a few tiny green tomatoes on the vine. A tomato will not set fruit when the nights turn cold, and the first early frost will knock out the plant.
Annual flowers are iffy, so buy cautiously. You might buy a few in large pots to enjoy the color. Basically, annuals are in decline, dying down and ready to set seed, or turn brown and shrivel up. Those in six-packs and four-inch pots are not worth the trouble or the money.
Bypass the seed rack altogether. With September breathing down our necks, there is not time to bring summer seeds into bloom. It amazes me to find summer annuals still sitting around in seed racks in October and beyond.
So, what’s a good buy for the savvy gardener? A whole lot, including evergreen and flowering shrubs, California natives, vines, roses in pots and trees in containers. Fall-flowering annuals and perennials that grow in cold weather such as calendulas, Iceland poppies, stocks and snapdragons thrive when nights are long and days are short.
Soon, you will find spring-flowering bulbs such as tulips and daffodils, which are planted in fall. Watch for the new crop of wildflower seeds, also sown in fall.
If you are looking for bonus buys, outdoor furniture offers remarkable savings because garden centers cannot over-winter these bulky items. Same goes for barbecue grills. You may find statuary and paving material on sale, but mostly this stuff can sit outdoors in the rain so there is not the pressing need to move it past the cash register.
The best advice when shopping garden sales: Buy cautiously and be sure the item, whether a living plant or a stone angel, will survive in your own yard for a decent length of time.
Plant a Row for the Hungry: Summer vegetables, plus a nice load of limes made up the mixed produce arriving at Community Pantry this past week. Backyard gardeners donated 285 pounds of produce to the Pantry, bringing the total to 4,712 pounds shared so far this year.
“The limes were a surprise, but everything from zucchini to corn to tomatoes are welcome to augment the food bags shared with our local folks,” says Mary Anne Hughes, Pantry director.
The Pantry is open weekdays to receive Plant a Row for the Hungry donations. If you have produce to share, the Pantry is located at 30 Airport Ave., Hollister. For more information, call (831) 637-0340.
