Hello friends welcome to Gardening with Creekside today I need to do a little bit of maintenance on
my deck boxes back here and so I thought I would bring you along for the ride because here we are
middle towards getting towards the end of August if you're like us in North Carolina we have had
a very long growing season and in order to keep our containers and our flower beds and our annuals
just looking fantastic there are just a few little garden chores that you can do in your garden
if you haven't been doing them throughout the season now is a great time to do it and to help
get your annuals that final push before the fall comes so what we have here behind us is this is on
our deck obviously and we um when we redid the whole patio area we had my well my daddy
volunteered he's a woodworker and so he built me these like raised flower beds that are on
two sides of my deck so i don't have railings i don't have steps because we don't access the deck
from this perspective from this way and so i've got these beautiful raised beds right here on
the edge of my deck and i fill them every spring summer fall with these beautiful flowering annuals
lots of fun lots of texture we've been here once i think already this season and i showed you about
like the coleus and the salvias and all the fun things i have in here and right now is very full
and very lush but if i don't address this right now then you know a couple weeks from now a month
from now is going to look overgrown my petunias and my calibrachoas are going to stop blooming
you do a little maintenance so we're going to do that it's really really simple but it will make
a huge difference it is a cloudy afternoon if you hear some rumbling in the distance there is some
thunder it the radar does say that it's not going to hit us but just know that we're being very safe
and we're okay this area gets full hot sun that is why jerry and i said we're going to do it in
the late afternoon early evening because it will be in the shade the problem with doing that of
course in august is that you can get those pop-up thunderstorms so without further ado i am going to
show you exactly how i'm going to maintain these flower beds so they get me through the rest of the
summer and into fall okay so what we are going to do is first we are going to the big like glaring
problems for me are my coleus and my salvia and then i want to trim up the petunias here so that
they are a little bit more lush if you never trim your coleus then they're going to get really kind
of tall and leggy and not real full i've been doing this throughout the growing season but you
can tell i'm starting to get some tops that are a little too tall and they're starting to come
over a little too much into the salvia so i mean the key of pruning your coleus is to come it down
right where you have at this point right here right here and we've got leaves coming in on each
side of that so you take your little snips your clippers and you're going to cut it so now what
happens is these guys are going to become nice thick branches right here and get nice and full
because we want to keep our coleus nice and tight and not too leggy this is one of the few
plants that i am pretty kind of particular about where i cut it and if you cut it um
in a kind of a more neat orderly fashion as opposed to just like giving it a haircut like what
i'm going to do with my petunias it really you won't really be able to tell after you're finished
that you have gone through and really trimmed this if you will go through and trim your coleus about
once every two to three weeks then it will stay nice and tight the entire time and you can see
there's not you know this is not rocket science it's not hard you find where two leaves are
and you and you cut and you just keep doing that all around the bush all around the plant
until you have pretty much touched every single one and it makes for a really nice
tight happy happy plant that when we get storms it will be nice and sturdy and it won't blow over
so that's what we're going to do to the coleus i've got five of them in the total of the bed
so i will go down through and do all of those i wanted to show you kind of like what i'm going to
do for every plant right now and then we'll come back and i'll do everybody um all at the same time
because basically it's just like once you figure out how to do it once you just keep on repeating
now this is rocking the plan rocking playing the blues salvia i should have said this is newly
nowhere coleus love this both of these are very vigorous growing plants and you have to maintain
them and keep them in check otherwise they will start to kind of crowd out other people you get to
decide when you're pruning who you want to shine if you want your salvia and your coleus to shine
and you don't really care about say the caladium then don't prune it back too much but i want this
caladium to go ahead and show so i'm going to come back and i just took out a pretty good sized limb
of this salvia but by doing that look how i opened up this area of the caladium now i can
get more sunlight down here on my petunias and the caladium and it just allows a little bit more room
to breathe so you can come in and be pretty severe on both the coleus and the salvias if you need to
if you don't need to well then that's fine you can see that this is an older bloom right here that's
really really tall really long and there's not very many blooms on it i'm just going to come down
and i just take this off like that because all of these are going to bloom on new growth the
more you kind of come in here and maintain you're encouraging it to put out new growth and be happy
and again we don't have leggy plants we do not want leggy plants again you can come in here
and be really precise or just take it down to where you can't see it see that's what we want
to get rid of we want to get rid of that so that these new guys right here will come and be full of
brand new pretty flowers for our pollinators to love on so we'll do that with the salvias
and then here we have two fantastic these are the supertunia mini vistas this is the brand new for
next year 2023 the mini vista yellow you can see it is a very happy plant and it is you know nice
and full and cascading over and then mini vista white so what we're going to do this is where i'm
not going to be precise and i'm going to come in and just give it a haircut so i'm just coming in
and just going to trim off the bottom of it that will encourage more new growth for these plants
you can see i'm just grabbing a handful and coming in and clipping and kind of give it
an overall haircut on the bottom and on the top it makes a little bit of a mess but that's all
right it's fine we'll clean it up once we're done so by doing this you're encouraging new growth am
i cutting off some blooms yes i am but i also know that this will make a very happy plant long term
i'm giving up a few blooms right now so that i can get a lot of blooms later on so it's kind of like
you just you got to make a little bit of small sacrifices and i'm not being really severe i'm
not going to go in and completely cut this back that's really all i'm going to do but you can see
even over here on this yellow one how it's really vigorous and coming down so i'm going to clean up
the bottom on that one as well so i'm just going to go around of course the rain has started so
we'll see how far i get today this may have to be continued till tomorrow morning but at least
we got to start on it and i will go as long as the weather permits so i'm just going to keep on
trimming my coleus my salvias giving everybody a little haircut and make them very happy plants
all of my trimming is done and you can see that i did not go out here and just go crazy and just
chop some things down i have been known to do that in the past but in this case it did not call
for it and then there is just no need nice gentle pruning on a regular basis will take care of your
annuals and just help them thrive throughout the growing season now what i am going to do is its
time to fertilize when you prune that's a great time to save yourself okay i also need to feed
these plants because remember food equals flowers food equals growth we want to feed these fantastic
plants because it is raining today i am not going to apply the there's a little lightning right
there i'm not going to apply the water-soluble fertilizer i will come back and do that probably
tomorrow morning once the rain whatever kind of rain happens tonight happens but what i am going
to do is apply the time release slow release fertilizer from proven winters this is the
the granular and this is what my mama calls the shake and bake so it has in here you can have a
little flip top lid and you can either use the holes or you can take the lid off and there is
a scoop in here that you can use to scoop this will last us in the south for about three months
at a time it is released by temperature we've had lots of warm hot days so all you do is simply go
in there and i'm gonna shake it in on the bottom of right on the soil i don't want it to be on the
leaves i want it to be on the soil great time to do it because as it's raining it'll start
to release some of that food then tomorrow i can come back and use my water soluble fertilizer am
i over fertilizing by using both no i'm not this is slow release water soluble is more fast acting
trust me these plants need food so this will happen once every three months your water soluble
if you can do it once a week that's amazing if not try to go for once every two weeks
at a minimum so i'm just going to shake this in and the rain's coming down a little harder
all right that is done i do want to give you an update on just how a couple of things are doing
before we call it today i know i'm sweet but i'm not made out of sugar a little rain won't
hurt jenny so i'm going to show you a couple of plants give you a couple updates and then we're
going to call this project done for today if you remember back in the spring i was on the back
porch and i put together two different containers one was complete shade and one's a little sunny in
shape so i'm gonna give you an update on those because um this one right here is doing fantastic
this container i got from kinsman garden company you know how much i love that place and so in here
it does have the new surefire white begonia that's coming out next year you can see
i've been fertilizing how nice and dark and green i've had to do a little bit of pruning
but beautiful white blooms on it with a little bit of yellow in the center and then in the
front we did the double up white begonias a lot of begonias in here but it was kind of fun to do and
then on each side was a diamond frost euphorbia and then of course the dichondra silver falls
on each side has done really well what i do is just basically give it the water and then i try to
try to remember that as my nemesis is doing the water-soluble fertilizer it's been done
several times like i said i have pruned it one time because the begonias were just getting so
tall but been very happy with this and it's been a nice little contrast and texture and color
here in this spot now then moving on down just a little bit now this one still needs
it didn't turn out exactly how i wanted it to have you ever had a container like that just
doesn't work out exactly how you want um yeah so that's what this one is now am i upset that this
container is not as spectacular as i was hoping it would be in my brain no why not because well these
are all perennials so i am going i already have plans and i am going to move all of these into
the landscape i think the container is too small for the root system for all of these plants this
is a lady in red fern fantastic love this fern but it'll get some height to it then we have the um
japanese painted fern from proven winters this is crested surf and as i'm sitting here talking
do you see hopefully the light will work if not i'll take a picture
do you see what that is on here that my friend is a little caterpillar and he is eating my plant
so here we have a little crispy critter that is eating my fern
that is a downside of having ferns is that you can get these caterpillars that will eat your foliage
you can use diatomaceous earth on this that's a great organic solution that you can use
and yeah so get rid of those so right now he is just going to get
squished and then we are losing some light folks storm is coming in we've got a beautiful
hosta right here this is june really pretty but because the ferns are kind of hanging over it's
not getting as big and as much light as it should and then the lamian lamian is another wonderful
perennial shade plant that does great in the container it didn't turn out exactly how i
wanted it to look that's all right i will put them in the ground come this fall you can tell
the storm's coming in and it is dark it's only like five o'clock in the afternoon and so i'm
trying to work with the light here so that i don't appear like i'm in like a complete shadow so
landscape lights are on whole nine yards i did get this project done just in the nick of time because
it's really coming down now that's gardening you know you find a moment when you have a chance
and you do it timing could have been better so i would have avoided the storm but anyway
real life here folks real life as always thanks so much regarding creekside y'all have a great
day and we'll see you in the next hopefully a little sunnier video see you next time bye