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4 Tips on Weeding a Garden

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Tips on Weeding a GardenSo you’ve planted your spring garden. Congratulations! Now you have make sure that weeds don’t overtake and destroy that beautiful landscape you’ve been dreaming about all winter. Here are some tips on weeding a garden.

Herbicides may help control some of the weeds you see springing up. But they’re not a long-term answer. You’ll need to pull up a lot of what you see and this can be hard work. Fortunately, there are ways to make this job a little easier.

1. Practice strategic weeding
The best time to weed is when the soil is damp. This could be after a rainstorm or deep watering. For weeds with a fibrous root system, you should wait until the soil has begun to dry. Also remember that if you can remove weeds when they are young and have not yet gone to seed, you can better control the overall weed population.

2. Use gloves and a good technique
If you are weeding by hand, a pair of gardening gloves will protect you from spines, thorns, sharp edges and sap that may irritate your skin. When you want to pull small weeds away from small plants, hold the soil down with one hand while pulling the weed out. For weeds with deeper roots, grab as much of the root as you can and pull the root up and out with a slight twisting motion. Put all weeds in a bucket or bag to minimize the spread of seeds.

3. Have the tools you need
If you don’t want to bend or kneel while you garden, hoes can help you sever weeds at or below ground level. Taproot diggers can also useful because their long necks and notched heads can pry up weeds with long roots. If you are gardening on a large plot of land, rototillers can help you work weeds into the soil.

4. Use mulch or ground covers
A good way to prevent weeds from cropping up is to mulch your garden with wood chips, shredded bark or leaves. You can achieve similar effects using landscaping fabric or black plastic. Both materials will discourage weed growth by essentially smothering them. But landscaping fabric will allow some air and water to penetrate to the ground below, which will lessen the chance that the roots of plants you want will accidentally dry out.

At South Austin Irrigation, we offer high-quality service for both residential and commercial watering systems and for your gardening needs. When you need irrigation experts, contact us!

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Preventing Yellow Spots on Blades of Grass

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Dried Grass

You’ve worked hard to get our outdoor landscape just the way you want it. Then you begin to notice yellow spots developing on blades of grass all over your lawn. What happened? And what can you do about it?

Assuming that you’re watering your lawn properly and not over-fertilizing, disease and pests are the most likely culprits. The most common diseases are iron chlorosis, which indicates nitrogen deficiency in the soil and yellow patch, which causes large spots or patches with yellow margins in the lawn. As for pests, chinch bugs cause irregular brown spots that turn yellow.

Each of these three problems has its own particular set of symptoms. Iron chlorosis manifests as yellow or striped yellow and green patches of grass blades on alkaline soils with high phosphorus levels. Yellow patch manifests as 6 to 12-inch wide patches on grass blades that occur in areas that are prone to either excessive shade or moisture. Chinch bugs cause yellowing by sucking essential juices from grass blades.

Once you’ve determined the nature of the problem, you can treat it as follows:

Iron chlorosis

Using a foliar application of iron sulfate, spread a one-quarter inch-thick compost over the turf and aerate the lawn twice a year.

Yellow patch

The damage caused by this disease is usually no more than cosmetic. But if the outbreak is severe, you may need to use a registered fungicide.

Chinch bugs

Aerate the soil one to two times a year to treat chich bugs and apply a registered insecticide to deter them.

If the problem is with how you are watering your lawn, grass blades will look different than if they are diseased or overrun with pests. Overwatering causes grass blade tips turn yellow and the blades themselves wilt. Underwatering causes grass blades to fade to yellow before turning brown and drying. If you are improperly fertilizing your lawn, then you will see a scorching effect that strips it of its healthy green color.

To address these particular issues, remember to use the recommended amount of fertilizer at the specified time/season. And if you haven’t been careful about watering, be sure to provide your lawn with — depending on the heat — anywhere from a half inch to one-and-a-half inches of water every week during the summer.

At South Austin Irrigation, we’re committed to helping you achieve and maintain more beautiful lawns and gardens. We offer irrigation system sales and repair service as well as expert horticultural advice. For all your landscaping needs, contact us today!

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3 Tips to Add Interest to Your Cold-Weather Landscape

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Winter hits homeThe colder weather of late fall and early winter strips away leaves and flowers from plants, leaving what look like “skeletons.” But with a little creativity, it’s still possible to bring an apparently dead landscape to life and create a genuinely enjoyable outdoor environment.

1.  Add focal points

These could include sculptures, arbors, ponds, boulders or even colorful containers. Features such as these become the center of attention and cause less pleasing ones (such as bare trees and shrubs) to fade into the background.

2.  Reimagine color and form

The one surefire way to perk up a cold-weather landscape is by adding a few sturdy evergreens. If you plant evergreens behind leafless deciduous trees and shrubs, their bold greenness can help bring out the sculpted beauty in the branches of “bare” plants.

3.  Consider the power of fragrance

Plants like witch hazel have a sweet fragrance no matter how cold the weather gets. Sweet box adds a pleasant vanilla scent into the air and also produces bright black berries that provide additional color.

The one major positive about a cold-weather landscape is that once leaves have fallen, you can see more clearly how you should prune your deciduous trees and bushes. A good rule of thumb to follow is to cut out branches that are crossing or rubbing against each other and to avoid cutting back new growth.

Late fall and winter can produce exciting new landscapes – if you know how to take advantage of what you have.

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5 Tips to Manage Excess Rain and Save Your Landscape

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LandscapeThe El Niño weather pattern that settled over the Pacific last summer and brought desperately needed rain isn’t quite done with southeast Texas just yet. There’s more wetness ahead, though not in the amounts seen over the last two weeks.

While water is a good for your lawn and garden, excessive amounts of it can wreak as much havoc as drought. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to limit the destruction that too much late spring rain can cause.

  1. Turn off your irrigation system

If you have an automatic irrigation system, make sure to shut it down when rain is in the forecast. This is particularly important because excess moisture can remove oxygen from the soil and drown roots. Also be sure to check your plants after rain to see if they are wilting and/or have signs of leaf scorching. These conditions are especially common in the hot weather that follows rainstorms.

  1. Avoid the mud

Consider putting down mulch between rows of plants so you can walk around your garden. You can also put down boards in your garden when the dirt is soaked. Either of these methods will help lessen soil compaction, which occurs when you walk directly on muddy areas. Remember, too, to wait until the soil has dried out before working in your garden.

  1. Combat soil compaction

A good way to combat soil compaction is to aerate the soil in and around your garden by using a core aerator. This tool removes small plugs in the soil and eases compaction. You can also hand-aerate by using a wooden or metal dowel rod to make holes.

  1. Mind the insects

Abundant rain brings out hungry slugs that will feed on both living and decaying plants. You can get rid of them by handpicking them out of your plants or setting up special slug traps. If you choose the former option, you can drown slugs in soapy water, smash them, spray them with 5 or 10 percent diluted ammonia.

  1. Beware standing water

Be aware that disease can spread from standing water to any produce you may be growing in your garden. Also, if you notice that plants in your garden have yellowed, do not eat any fruit or vegetables from them. And if water that has been contaminated with sewage or animal manure has seeped into your garden, do not consume fruits or vegetables that have come in contact with it.

Call South Austin Irrigation at (512) 534-7449 to find out how we can help to keep your landscape looking fresh.

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4 Trees for a More Colorful Autumn

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Red autumn oak tree

One of the great pleasures of autumn is watching tree leaves turn different shades of yellow, orange and red. But here in Austin, the changes in color are less dramatic than they are in more northerly climates.

That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the best show of the season. Texas has several native trees that do color highly during this time of year. With a little planning, you can create a vivid autumn spectacle for your landscape.

1. Bigtooth Maple

This tree, which sometimes looks more like a shrub, matures at 15 feet or taller on good soils. During the fall, the leaves turn a beautiful bright red and gold.

2. Flowering Dogwood

Though most noted for the white flowers it produces in the spring, the leaves on this tree – which can grow as high as 40 feet and requires acidic soil – produces gorgeous scarlet red leaves in the fall.

3. Texas Red Oak

This species of oak grows up to 30 feet high and has foliage that turns a bright orange-red when the weather cools. It tolerates poor and rocky soils and is also resistant to Oak Wilt.

4. Eastern Black Cherry/Escarpment Black Cherry

These two trees are native to Texas Hill Country and can grow to 25 feet and sometimes taller. Both have pendulous branches and leaves that turn a lovely shade of yellow in the fall.

5. Carolina Buckthorn

The Carolina Buckthorn is a multi-stemmed understory tree growing 15-20 feet tall and wide. In autumn, its leaves turn yellow. Red berries provide additional interest and color.

 

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Our sprinkler repair service areas include:

  • Austin, TX
  • Lakeway, TX
  • Spicewood, TX
  • Horseshoe Bay, TX
  • Dripping Springs, TX
  • Wimberly, TX

Give us a call for sprinkler repair and service in your area: (512) 534-7449

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  • Toro
  • Nelson Turf
  • KRain
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