Frost coming to Kansas City Landscaping

Many of the plants we love to plant in the fall are chosen especially because they are fairly frost tolerant. Flowers such as pansy, kale, ornamental cabbage, Hardy Mums are all frost tolerant and can extend the beauty of your garden by several weeks. A complete list of frost tolerant plants

Your lawn will not be so strongly effected by the frost. Its correlation with lowering soil temperatures will have an effect but the actual grass tissue will likely not be harmed by the frost in any way. The only caveat to this is that if you walk on frosted turf you can damage the grass blades and they will turn brown if conditions are just right. This is because when you step on the turf while frost is on the grass, you can explode the frozen tissue causing it to die away. This is just cosmetic damage but can stay visible for a long time until next Spring when new growth replaces the killed tissues.

My primary suggestion when dealing with fall frost is to allow nature to decide when its time for this years growing season will end — knowing some seasons will be longer and other will be shorter.

There has been a near media blitz this year informing Kansas City Gardeners.  However while looking at an Overland park landscape last week I saw more mulch volcanoes. 

I can fin no excuse that there are professional landscaping companies out there who still continue to pile mulch around trees.  It make me very sad to know that there continues to be companies and residents who are having there landscaping ruined by either ignorant or careless landscapers.

Here you can see the results

Notice how the bark has already started to rot away.  The darker color indicated the bark that was dying and ready to peel off.  Additionally, the picture doesn’t show it well.  However there were also multiple insect holes in the bark under the mulch.

Kansas City Landscaping with

Webworms

Have you seen webs in your trees that look similar to this?

Well, you’re not alone.  They have appeared all over Kansas City this summer.  The good news is they are relatively harmless tot eh trees they are in.  They are the protective casings made by caterpillars while they feed on the leaves of the tree.  Although the space where they are feeding will lose its leaves – next season you will not even be able to tell they are there.

They especially like birch, walnut and ash tress in my experience.

Here is a quick video that shows webworms alive in there webs.

Spraying is not necessary.  If they are unsightly – a broom works well to remove them from trees.

Lawns all across Overland Park are suffering from a disease known as Brown Patch Rhizoctonia solani.

Brown Patch is a serious infection on Turf Type Tall Fescue lawns that often can be clearly identified by the large circular brown patches that quickly appear in a lawn.  Unfortunately – what often happens when homeowners ere these patches appear they assume drought stress – since brown patchy usually appears during the first very hot humid stretch of the year.  However, this usually will only help spread the disease further since Brown patch thrives in lawns that are moist for a prolonged amount of time when night time temps remain above 70 degrees.

The good news is that Brown patch rarely kills the entire plant and rather just causes leaf tissue damage and a thinning of the turf – which will recover once fall brings cooler temperatures and more vigorous grown back to Kansas City’s lawns.

Once Brown Patch is present follow these recommendations in order of importance:

• Stop all overhead watering except in the early morning hours.
• Bag grass clippings and dispose of them off site. 
• Use a fertilizer such as Prostar, Bayleton of Daconil.  These are expensive and only somewhat useful as a curative.
• Once Brown Patch has stopped spreading – fertilize with a  light .25#/n dose of nitrogen from an  organic source such as Miloganite, Bradfield’s or Espoma. 

The old adage – Plant a $5 plant in a $25 hole holds true in Kansas City’s Landscaping.

On a  recent project I planted over 70 Hostas, Coral Bells and Astible in an existing garden.  This garden had gravel already put down and the soil underneath was not great.  Normally, when making a new bed it is best to amend the entire bed with high quality organic compost.  However, this is not possible in a bed that already is covered with several inches of gravel.  So you have to amend the planting hole.  You have to be careful when doing this though.  You have to make the hole quite large in comparison to the plant you are planting.

Start by removing the rocks from where you are going to dig the hole.    Notice that the hole is about 3x as big as the plant itself.

The laws of geometry then say that you are not just increasing the volume of the hole by 3 – but closer to 9x the original plant container size so you will need to add a considerable amount of extra compost.  I use a high quality compost made from landscaping debris.    It is tested regularly to ensure its purity of toxins. 

After mixing the compost with the native soils – carefully plant the plant.

With Coral bells specifically – Be careful of their crown and make sure that crown of the plant is carefully planted just below the surface.

Then slide the rocks back in place around the plant.

Each plant can take upwards of 10 minutes to plant carefully and correctly.  So it truly is a $25 hole for a $5 plant.  However, The long term growth and vigor of the plants will be worth it to the customer.  However, with 70+ plants to plant – it is not a quick job.

One of the landscaping projects I am most excited about this year is the remaking of a new clients complete backyard in Brookside.  These clients called me in April, looking to have the work done by their wedding in May.  In order to get things done in time I knew we would have to work fast to be able to schedule, plan and get everything ready.  Right now, we are on track.

The Landscaping Plan

The plan was fairly simple and drawn out on the spot since we were going to have to move fast.  Essentially, we will be removing all the existing shrubs in the back since they were not part of a cohesive plan.  New beds would be created around the perimeter of the property and then new sod would be installed.

The Plants

Here are the plants that we will be using in this landscaping project.

The Dirt

Dirt is quite a misnomer.  I don’t use dirt for many of my Kansas City Landscaping Projects.  This is 8 yards of pure compost.  Generated organically from a local yard waste recycling center.  It is the single most important thing to the the landscapes I plant not just surviving, but thriving.  This dirt will be spread out and tilled into all bed and new lawn areas.

The Removal

A lot of plants had to be removed before anything else could be accomplished.

Once all the shrubs were removed.  This is what it looked like as it filled my trailer! There is a lot of plant material in that trailer !

Moving the Dirt

Here are progress shots as the

compost is trucked around to the back.  Because of the layout of this yard, the dirt could only be moved by wheelbarrow.  10,000 – 12,000 pounds of compost was used for this project.

That was the stage 1 of the project.  Next, will be the more exciting part of preparing the beds and installing the plants.

Stay tuned

This year, Kansas City Landscaping has seen a Spring that was more gradual than in past years.  This has been good for the plants and lawns in Kansas City .  Consistently cool Kansas City temperatures with only rare and short warm-up have allowed us to gradually slip into Spring and avoid the landscaping pitfalls of moving too fast.  Landscapers like slow springs because very few plants have been hurt by April freezes this year and although it has been fairly dry the plants have faired well.  However, gradual will soon give way to rapid growth as soon as we get some heat.  Lawn Mowing will soon be the most common weekend chore for most Kansas City homeowners. 

Blue Grass and Fescue lawns have thrived in this slightly cooler temperature.  They have been growing laterally and down for the last several weeks.  The imminent heat will spur rapid upward growth – we will soon be mowing VERY often!

One of the negatives of this low soil temperature ahs been for any new spring lawn seeding.  The grass has not grown much at all if any.  That is again due to cooler than normal soil temps.  This may not be a great thing for Spring seeded lawns since it simply will not have the time needed to grow before summer heat sets in.  However, if my inside sources at NBC Action News are accurate, we may have a cooler than normal Summer which would be good for all of Kansas City’s lawns. 

Its a purely human phenomenon – really. If you see a mistake repeated often enough then it becomes perceived not as a mistake, but as the way things should be done. This is being done in Kansas City Landscapes right now

This is the case with the dreaded Mulch Volcano. Mulch volcanoes are not a Kansas City landscaping phenomenon, they effect cities all over the US

.

Despite recent public campaigns by The Johnson County Extension Office and the City of Overland Park, there are still instance found all over the city.

The above example was just yesterday ata very nice office park. I am sure that the manager of this office park paid good money to a “reputable” landscaping company to maintain their landscaping. However, what has now happened is that these trees have been forever weakened by this ignorant practice

When mulch is spread more than 2″ thick against the base of a tree several things happen — and none of the m are good. First, the mulch will hold moisture against the trunk pf the tree. This si dangerous because it encourages rotting and disease. It will also rot the bark away adding additional avenues for insects and disease to attack the flesh of the tree. Roots are also damaged by the moisture held in the mulch because they will grow upwards seeking this moisture. As they do they will begin to circle the trunk. These circling roots will eventually kill the tree byessentially strangling it.

How should trees be mulched then? Trees should be mulched 2″ – 3″ thick (about one finger deep) and all mulch should be pulled away from the trunk of the tree truck 2 or 3 inches. Think doughnut instead of volcano. How big you want the mulch ring to be is up to you. Ideally — it should extend to the drip line of the tree — but that is not always practical or aesthetically the best choice. However, a good minimum is a 6′ diameter.

Here is what a tree looks like when you peel away the mulch volcano after several years. This particular was at a new customer in Overland Park that I started working with this season. I did not pull the mulch away — it was done before he had moved in. You can see that this tree will NEVER be a beautiful specimen again and will likely die prematurely from earlier neglect.

Mulch volcanoo aftermath

A Hard freeze is coming up Monday night and will effect Kansas City Landscaping plants for sure.  However, I wanted to help people see HOW to protect the plants.  When you put a cover over the plant it needs to go all the way down to the ground and preferably be staked to provide air flow around plants of 1 –2 inches.

The reason is, by covering the plant you are holding in latent heat from the ground and sheltering from the wind.

This person, who I came upon my walk yesterday, had NOT done that.  She did everything wrong.  First she used plastic – a terrible insulator and second she didn’t help the plant out at all because the air in the bag is going to be just as cold as the air outside of the bag.  To cover this plant well she should have places something over the plant that would have gone all the way to the ground.  This would have helped keep the temperature around the plant just a couple degrees warmer and protected it from the blast of cold air we received.

Excuse the poor picture please – it was taken with a camera phone while holding a three year old and being pulled by a dog in a 30 mph wind.

Here are some general guidelines for the frost hardiness of plants in Kansas City Gardens

Vegetables

Annuals

Hardy	Tolerant	Tender	Warm Loving
Corn Flower	Black Eyed Susan	Aster	Ageratum
Ornamental Cabbage	Calendula	Nicotiana	Balsam
Pansy	Coreopsis	Petunia	Begonia
Primrose	Dianthus	Scabiosa	Celosia
Violet	Snap Dragon	Statice	Cosmos
	Sweet Pea	Sweet Alyssum	Impatiens
	Torenia	Verbena	Lobelia
			Marigold
			Portulaca
			Phlox
			Salvia
			Vinca
			Zinnia

Thank you to the University of Purdue for supplying information needed to create this informative chart.