By Bill Scheffler ~ Oct 1, 2004

Here are some garden news and tips for the Chicago area for Oct 1, 2004.

Watering and Feeding Your Trees

Our dry spell continues and the trees are soaking up every drop as fast as we can give it. I have been using some soaker hoses under trees and the ground is good and wet after 12 hours but I can see where we need to do this about once per week. Many of the trees are just giving up and dropping dry leaves without turning fall color. Both Larry Acker (3fforecasts.com) and Greg Soulje (under construction, right Greg?) are calling for good moisture over the winter but it won't start until later ... probably after Thanksgiving. The good news is there should be good moisture in the ground next spring but the trees will have low reserves, which will make it tough on some trees to push out new leaves next spring. Also the new leaves that are low in nutrients will get more insect and disease trouble as well as tattering from the wind.

I'll give an example; copper is a micro-nutrient that plants absorb from the soil. Copper is the elasticity mineral in nature. It helps the plants to be supple. Split bark on tree trunks is a copper deficiency for example. The wood of the trunk loses its suppleness when copper is low and when the sap rises in the springtime the wood is not able to swell with the sap, so it splits. It's the same with tattered leaves. Most diseases in trees are also a copper deficiency. My grandfather used to put ONE copper nail in some trees to help them with disease control. More than that will kill the tree! A zinc nail too. I always thought that was very clever.

I am doing lots of tree feeding right now. Foliar feeding is absorbed 15x faster than root feeding but soon the leaves will be dropping so I am doing a mixture of both. Long term work is done through the soil and fine tuning is done with the foliars. Bark has pores just like our skin and will absorb food very well, so we also soak the bark of trees. The most important foods for trees are minerals and carbohydrates and a little bit of nitrogen. These are raw materials for trees and they use these as building blocks to make what they need. Plants are good that way.... they make what they need!

Nematodes for Grubs

I applied nematodes on some grubs, last week, and had great success. I had always heard that nematodes were unreliable and in the past that was true. Now they have stronger nematodes and better packaging so the survival rate is better. I was very excited by this result and am happy to get off the grub poisons. Nematodes are a little touchy and require extra care and preparation but if it works it is definitely worth it.

I get a lot of questions about winterizer fertilizers with weed control. Most weeds are annuals and will die with a frost, so I don't recommend weed poisons at this time of year. Why poison the soil when a frost will do the same job for free? It's not worth it. April, maybe, but not now. Our average first frost is Oct 6 which is coming right up. We'll discuss this more in a later tip.

That's it for now ... take care and keep up on your watering as best as you can.