LITTLE ROCK — THIS MONTH

Summer’s end is in sight. It’s a great time to add color to your garden, deadhead (remove spent flowers) annuals and perennials, clean up declining or dead annuals and lightly fertilize the living so they can rebound and bloom until frost.

If perennials are too crowded, begin to divide them as we head into fall.

Plant a vegetable garden. For quick returns, plant lettuce, micro-greens and radishes. You can also plant spinach, beets, greens and carrots from seeds, but use transplants of broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower so you’ll get a harvest before winter.

If you are finished with vegetable gardening for the year, consider planting a cover crop.

For fall color, plant mums, asters, flowering kale and cabbage, and you can even replant some petunias, callibrachoa and dusty miller.

Ornamental peppers are a quick fix for fall color. They come in bright, bold colors and will last until frost.

It is too early for pansies or violas - wait until October.

If you didn’t fertilize the lawn this summer, apply one last application now. It is too late to use herbicides to control summer weeds, but later this month or in October you can apply a pre-emergent herbicide to help prevent winter weeds.

Mow the lawn weekly, and unless they’re very long, leave the clippings in place to recycle nutrients.

Do not quit watering. Mulch to conserve moisture.

Take inventory of your garden and figure out what worked and what didn’t.

SEPTEMBER LESSON

Planting cover crops is a great way for gardeners to end their growing season and give something back to the soil.

Basically, cover crops are a mass planting of a living mulch to protect the soil while you aren’t growing your vegetable or flower garden. The plants used should build the soil, retain its nutrients, control erosion and prevent weeds.

These plants are also called green manure crops when the green matter gets tilled back into the soil before you begin gardening next spring.

If you look on websites or in gardening publications, you will find a fairly extensive list of plants that will work. Two in particular that grow well here, I wouldn’t plant - they include hairy vetch and buckwheat. Both of these plants have the potential to freely reseed themselves, and you’d end up creating a weed problem even though you are improving the soil.

Some better choices to sow would be to a field of turnips or mustard greens. They grow well most of the winter, and you will be able to harvest the greens as well as turnips in the spring.

Other root crops include carrots, parsnips and beets, which can take fairly cool weather and help hold the soil.

You can harvest vegetables off and on all winter. Three good choices that enrich the soil are Austrian peas, rye grass and wheat.

All of these cover crops can be planted from now through October. When planting, sow the seed in a mass, not in narrow rows. The key is to blanket the soil - cover it with plants.

Extremely cold winter weather sometimes nips back some of the more tender plants, but they usually begin growing again when the cold passes.

Before planting your garden next spring, you should harvest what you want of the vegetables (if you planted a crop that can double as a vegetable), and then till the green matter into the soil. Till it under a good two to three weeks before planting your next season’s garden, so the green matter breaking down in the soil won’t interfere with the new seedlings or plants as they get established.

HomeStyle, Pages 39 on 09/01/2012