11 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Fall Blooms
Just because fall is here, you don’t have to give up on your flowers. Join farmer Briana Yablonski to learn helpful tips for extending your fall flower harvest and keeping your plants healthy so they can produce more blooms.
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When you think of flowers, you may imagine spring garden beds filled with ranunculus and daffodils or summer fields bursting with sunflowers and zinnias. But you can have flowers in the fall, too! Although the cooler weather and shorter days provide some growing challenges, knowing a few tips will help keep your plants producing.
Some of the following fall flower care tips relate to keeping your plants healthy via appropriate irrigation, mulching, and maintenance. Other tips relate to choosing suitable plants and tailoring their care to your growing zone.
Whether you have a garden full of cut flowers or a few containers with blooming annuals, remember these care tips this fall.
Deadhead Regularly
Although fall often removes some of the long days and travel-filled weekends we associate with summer, it brings its own type of business. Fall days in the garden are packed with activities like harvesting fall veggies, clearing old crops, and covering empty garden beds to prepare them for a long winter’s rest. When you add in life outside the garden, it’s understandable that you may not get a chance to harvest every blooming flower when it’s at its peak.
Rather than letting dead flowers languish on your plants, spend a few minutes each week removing the dry, discolored blooms. This act of deadheading will stop the plants from sending energy to the old flowers and allow them to focus on producing new blooms.
However, you should leave some old flowers on your plants if you hope to collect seeds. A flower must fully mature before the seed is ripe and ready to collect.
Mulch to Regulate Temperatures
One of my favorite parts about fall is the cool mornings that demand warm wool socks and a few layers of well-worn jackets. Each day, I begin the morning bundled up for the cold and am down to a t-shirt by the afternoon. While we can easily adjust to the changing temperatures by donning and removing layers, plants don’t have the same abilities.
Adding mulch around your plants is one way to help plants tolerate large temperature swings. A few inches of wood chips, shredded leaves, straw, or other types of organic material will help insulate the soil. This insulating effect helps the soil stay warmer at night and cooler during the day. Therefore, your plants experience decreased stress.
Once below-freezing temperatures arrive, mulch continues to offer benefits. When the ground continually freezes and thaws, it pushes plant roots toward the soil, leaving them susceptible to cold air damage from cold air. A layer of mulch will protect the roots and limit cold damage.
Protect Plants from Early Frost
The first fall frost is always bittersweet. By this point in the year, I’m ready for slower days and smaller to-do lists, so the frost is a welcome reminder to slow down. Nevertheless, saying goodbye to some of my favorite flowers is always hard.
It may seem futile to try to care for tender blooms amidst cold fall weather. However, if you expect a single early frost followed by weeks of above-freezing temperatures, protecting your blooms can be worth it.
Adding a layer or two of row cover over your plants will often help them survive temperatures in the low 30s (~0°C). Just make sure to suspend the cover over the crops rather than letting it touch the tops of the plants.
When the temperatures warm up, remove the row cover so the plants can receive full sun. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to enjoy a few more weeks of zinnias, cosmos, celosia, and other frost-sensitive flowers.
Remove Diseased Debris
Although you can skip some commonly recommended garden cleanup tasks this fall, you shouldn’t walk away from cleanup entirely. As the growing season progresses, cooler temperatures and increased moisture can support the development of diseases like powdery mildew, leaf spot, and anthracnose. If left unchecked, these diseases can weaken your plants and decrease harvests of beautiful blooms.
Leaving diseased tissue on your plants will weaken fall growth and spread disease to future crops. By carefully pruning away affected plant parts, you not only prevent the disease from spreading but also encourage air circulation, which helps to keep the remaining foliage dry and healthy.
Before you prune, look for signs of disease like spotted leaves, rotten stems, or a powdery coating covering the leaves. Use a clean, sharp pair of pruning shears to remove the infected parts. Don’t place the diseased tissue in your compost pile since many backyard piles don’t get hot enough to kill harmful pathogens. Instead, put it in the trash or burn pile.
Monitor Your Irrigation Schedule
Irrigating in the fall can be tricky. Although daytime temperatures can still be warm, nighttime temps drop close to freezing. When you add in unpredictable rainfall, it can be difficult to know how much to water.
Even if the air feels damp, you should make sure to regularly water during dry spells. Regular watering is especially important for newly planted perennials. If these species are drought-stressed heading into the winter, they will be less likely to survive the cold temperatures.
A good starting point is to water deeply once a week in the fall. Depending on the temperature and sunlight, you may need to water more or less.
Although drought can lead to plant stress, so can wet soil. As daylight and temperatures decrease, plants lose less water through evapotranspiration. Therefore, they require less water. That means you should expect to decrease the amount you irrigate as you head deeper and deeper into autumn.
Plant Cold-Hardy Species
While many people are concerned with the first fall frost, 32°F (0°C) isn’t the magic number for every plant. Although frost will kill many common garden flowers, most flowering plants experience a decrease in bloom production as temperatures dip near freezing. But some will continue to flower even after freezing temperatures arrive!
Before you add new varieties to your garden, pay attention to their cold hardiness. Don’t expect them to thrive or survive the winter if they aren’t recommended for your growing zone.
If you want to continue to enjoy a colorful after your first frost, you can! One option is to plant frost-tolerant blooms like pansies and violas. You can also plant perennials that produce colorful ornamental berries and cold-tolerant annuals like ornamental kale and cabbage.
Don’t Discount Plants After a Light Frost
When the first frost finally arrives, it’s not always a hard, killing frost. Sometimes, the frost settles on some parts of the plant while leaving other parts unharmed. If that happens, open flowers and some foliage may be damaged, but closed buds can still turn into healthy flowers if the weather permits.
If you’re not sure if plants will continue to bloom after some frost damage, you can wait and see. You can always remove them later if they turn out to be dead from frost.
Divide Crowded Perennials
Fall is one of the best times of the year to divide many types of perennials. Dividing crowded plants helps increase airflow, limit disease, and improve access to water and nutrients. Plus, it allows you to move them to new sections of the garden or share them with friends.
The cooler weather and shorter days of fall allow you to divide without causing unbearable stress. This weather is also ideal for replanting in new areas.
For best results, divide and replant your perennials about a month before your anticipated first frost. After they settle into their new homes over the winter, they’ll continue to grow the following spring.
The best way to divide perennials is to use a shovel to dig up the plant’s entire root ball. Once it’s out of the ground, you can remove extra soil and use your hands to tease apart the individual plants. If the plant isn’t divided into clean segments, you can cut the roots and stems with a sharp knife.
You can divide many flowering perennials in the fall, including those listed below.
- Astilbe
- Salvia
- Black-eyed Susan
- Bleeding Heart
- Columbine
- Coneflower
- Coral Bells
- Veronica
- Liatris
Dig Up Cold Sensitive Perennials
Before you add new perennials to your garden, I recommend looking at their cold hardiness. Each tag should provide information including a plant’s preferred moisture level, sun exposure, and growing zones.
If you live in a zone that’s colder than recommended, the plant is unlikely to survive the winter outdoors. While the easiest option is planting varieties that are hardy to your growing zone, sometimes you just can’t say no to a plant that’s not right for your zone.
While you can replant each year, another option is to dig them up and bring them indoors over winter. Aim to remove roots from the ground before the first frost arrives, then place them in a pot. Set them in a cool area like a garage or covered porch. You can replant them outdoors the following spring.
Collect Mature Seeds
Although many gardeners cut down old flower stalks, these mature flowers offer multiple benefits. Not only do they help feed birds throughout the winter, but they also provide mature seeds that are ready to collect. Saving these seeds allows you to save money, experiment with producing new varieties, and develop plants that are well-suited to your specific growing zone.
Fall is often the best time to collect seeds from both annual and perennial flowers. By this time of the year, the flowers will have matured and produced viable seeds.
There are many different ways to collect flower seeds, and each gardener has their own tricks and tips for collecting and dividing seeds. However, the basic steps include removing the seed heads from the plant, placing them in a labeled bag or container for storage, and separating each individual seed. If the seeds aren’t fully dry when you collect them, you should also take time to dehydrate them before placing them into storage.
Anticipate Slowed Growth
If your garden is where you go to unwind, you probably like to spend a lot of time looking at your plants. Therefore, you likely know when a new pest starts eating your greens, a speckled disease appears on your flowers, or flowers stop pumping out blooms.
When you notice the last item on the above list, don’t panic. As the days grow shorter and cooler in the fall, plants naturally slow their growth. This means few new leaves and a noticeable decrease in the number of new flowers each week. Rather than changing your watering schedule or piling on fertilizer, just sit back, relax, and let nature take its course.