With a super soggy May in the rearview, your garden might need some extra TLC. Certain plants, trees and shrubs are susceptible to too much water. With these techniques, your gardens and landscape will be on the upswing and can thrive for the rest of the season.
Vegetable plants, like tomatoes, and shrubs like lilac and some cherry and other fruit trees might be showing signs of damage from the wet spring. Plus, even any newly replanted seedlings may need a helping hand.
It's common after a stretch of wet weather to see certain veggie plants showing blight, especially tomatoes.
Blight is a disease carried by fungi or bacteria and can have numerous effects on your garden, like leaf spots, wilting or the plants may even die.
If you see blight happening on you tomato plants, you can salvage them. Try stripping off all the bottom leaves of the plant and leave only the top whorl of leaves. The tomato plants should recover fairly quickly, providing a bountiful crop later in the season.
Similar blights can occur on cherry trees, too. It might look like browning of the leaves, or the leaves may wilt and die. And lilacs aren't immune to too much rain - blossoms on lilacs can die prematurely because of May's cooler air temperatures and because they got too wet.
Plus, if you planted vegetables from seed and transplanted the seedlings (maybe you're following along in our Sprouted gardening newsletter course?) those seedlings may not have fared well, with all the rain.
The good news is that bean seeds, edamame seeds, cucumber, melon, squash can all be replanted and you can still get a good crop.
After our unusually rainy May, some of these plants, though, may have advanced disease on them, like some lilacs and cherry trees, and sour cherry bushes. If that's the case, the best thing to do is clean them up as best you can - deadhead the lilacs, clean up any of the cherry blossoms or fruits that have dropped and clean the area underneath the bushes.
Of course, the rains may have also caused an increase in slugs and snails. They love cooler, wetter weather, like we had in our region in May.
More from Vermont Public: How to keep slugs from turning your garden into a salad bar
Control the snails and slugs by cleaning around all your plants and remove leaves and other vegetation so the soil is dry and well-drained.
Then try a couple of these remedies to eradicate the pests - sprinkle crushed seashells or even old sheep's wool around your plants as mulch.
Sheep's wool has tannins and is scratchy and the shells are sharp. These irritants create a barrier that slugs and snails don't want to cross.
If these remedies don't work, try an iron phosphate bail, like Sluggo. It's toxic to the pests but safe for wildlife, pets and the environment.
Can an aggressive weed and flowers coexist
Q: I was gifted some perennials and with them some bishop's weed. I cannot get rid of it with weeding. I don't want to cover the bed with black plastic to kill it because I will lose all my other plantings. I deadhead the flowers to try to prevent the spread but it's bad this season. - Parker, via email
A: This presents a conundrum, since you have flowers already in the bed, so you might need to divide and conquer.
If the bishop's weed has really overrun most of the garden bed, dig up and remove the flowers and replant them elsewhere.
Once the flowers are relocated, go back in to the bed were the bishop's weed is and mow it down, repeatedly, the whole summer.
More from Vermont Public: Weeding 101: Remove some in the sun and some after rain
A black plastic tarp could really help in this situation now and into the next year. Using it to cover the weed can help weaken it. Then next year, after a good rain, go out and try to dig up the weeds.
Then, in the years to come, after weakening and remove the bishop's weed, you may be able to reintroduce your flowers to the bed
Getting rid of mossy stonecrop without harmful pesticides
Q: I have this "mossy stonecrop" thing all over the yard. How can I get rid of them without using any harmful herbicides? - Teri, via email
A: Stone crop, also known as sedum, is a shallow-rooted plant that likes a lot of sun and dry conditions. That's a bit of a clue as to how to control it!
Sedum can be easily pulled up, then after removing it, cover the lawn area with compost and mulch. That will make things wetter in the yard, and the mossy stonecrop will be less likely to spread.
Next, top-dress the lawn first with soil and then over seed it with lawn grass seed. Hopefully, the result will be a thicker, lusher lawn and better conditions for your grass and plants to grow.
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