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Some friends and I had the opportunity to visit several garden centers just outside of Philadelphia last week. I always like to do some greenhouse reconnaissance, or as my husband says, just plain snooping. I was happy to see several cars at all three places, and a mixture of beautiful blooming perennials, and large, well-shaped shrubs. The only thing I was disappointed in was the annuals. Planters and hanging baskets that should have been full of flowers and bright green leaves were straggly, yellow and in need of deadheading.

It’s a common problem, hanging baskets planted in March for Mother’s Day sales look a little sad three months later. Take a look at your deck, porch or patio. How are your baskets and containers faring?

A few simple steps can take your tired, straggly plants and give them new life for the rest of the season.

1. Evaluate the plant varieties. Early season annuals like pansies, nemesia, lobelia, and the like are beautiful in the cooler temps of April and May but get pretty stressed in the heat of July. Remove these cool-season annuals and transplant them to a shady flower bed. They should recover in the fall and bloom again once the mercury comes back down.

2. Fill in the holes with more heat-tolerant flowers like lantana, pentas, zinnias, verbena, calibrachoas, petunias, vinca, or for shady spots: impatiens, begonias, or torenia also know as wishbone flower.

3. Are you feeding enough? I don’t recommend fertilizing plants in the ground, with the possible exception of the vegetable garden. However, plants in a container without access to the complex soil network of organic matter and active organisms that release nutrients into the soil need a little supplementation. Whether you chose the yellow-and-green box or any other balanced fertilizer, a liquid feeding program at every watering or at least three times a week should rejuvenate yellow leaves and give blooms a boost.

*A word about fertilizer: The three numbers on the box such as 15-5-15 or 24-8-16 refer to the ratio of N (nitrogen), P (phosphorus) and K(potassium). This is a generalization, but nitrogen promotes leaf growth and will keep leaves looking green, the phosphorus promotes general cell growth and the potassium component promotes flower color and size. Some fertilizers add other minerals such as iron, magnesium or calcium. Some plants like petunias and calibrachoas like a little extra iron. Others, like geraniums don’t. Just as you read a cereal box to know what you are feeding your kids, read the fertilizer box to know what you are feeding your plants.

*One more tip- a drop of dish-soap in a gallon of water will help the soil absorb water.

4. This step is probably the easiest and the most effective. Are you ready? Give it a haircut. Cutting back overgrown plants by half will bring the container back into balance, promote branching, so straggly plants grow back fuller, and will stimulate flowering for those trailers that are only blooming on the tips. With our hanging baskets, a radical trimming to the edge of the container will take about 2 weeks to grow back in, but will drastically improve the appearance for the rest of the season.

5.Deadheading spent blooms periodically will also promote heavier flowering and clean up the appearance of baskets. This is especially true for larger flowering plants like geraniums, verbena, and some petunias. Often smaller flowers are self-cleaning, or shed their petals, but still benefit from a light shearing periodically.

My last piece of advice is to watch the water. A woman remarked to me several weeks ago that her hanging baskets always died by late June. As an afterthought, she added that it might have helped to water them. Put your finger in the soil, if it feels moist, leave it alone. If it’s dry, water. As plants get larger, and are in full sun, they need more frequent watering. Plants that you have trimmed, baskets in shaded areas, or ferns, let dry out more before irrigating.

On that note, I think I’ll heed my own advice and go rip out the pansies in front of my kitchen door.

At a recent lecture that examined bird behavior after the breeding season, I learned something about plants that I already knew. Let me try to explain that fact which keen-eyed gardeners, plant researchers and birds agree on.

The calendar year for most birds is driven by five events. Where do I spend the winter, spring and fall migration, breeding and raising young, and the 45 to 60 days between the empty nest and fall migration.

True, we have a few birds that skip the migrations, but they are in the minority.

The breeding season is the most studied aspect of the five and the most active for most bird watchers. Most birds feed their young insects. What varies is where and how they find them.

Our common robin is what they call a generalist. He’s happy in our yards or in the deepest forest. He generally isn’t concerned about elevation or whether it is wet or dry under foot. We are in the middle (north /south) of his breeding range. In the winter we are at the northern tip of his range.

Most birds are more specific, picking a spot from anywhere on the ground to the tops of the tallest trees. Some like it near water, some don’t. Often their spring and early summer homes and nesting sites are driven by temperature ranges.

Several weeks ago I chased down a new bird in West Virginia which nests in the grass several feet off the ground. But he wants to be near a woods edge in a brushy meadow in a small clearing. As a bird of concern, the wildlife agencies there are clearing patches in thickets, fencing them and leasing them to beef farmers for light grazing. It appears to be working.

Some of us just look at birds. Then you look for birds. As you gain experience you slowly begin to figure out that you must look where they are. Breeding season is the easiest time to find a variety of birds.

The period between raising young and fall migration is the least understood and researched. Where are the birds in that period? There is much variation between species and even between sexes and juveniles of the same species.

What is obvious is that they frequently are not where they were during the breeding and nesting season. Why?

The birds have figured out that the lush plant growth that occurs in the spring brings lots of insect activity. As the growth slows, the plant builds natural defenses and the insects become less plentiful. The birds know that, do we?

Last summer, after eating his fill of the wild milkweed that permeates the flower beds below the store, a fat monarch caterpillar made his way in the door and spun his chrysalis on one of the chairs. 5-yr old Liam and I had a blast watching it hatch one warm day. What a great experience to share.

Attracting butterflies to your garden is easy. Keeping them is a bit more work.

Adult butterflies feed only on nectar, so are attracted to open flowers. Common nectar sources are butterfly bushes, verbena, lantana, members of the daisy family like coneflowers, liatris, black-eyed Susans, coreopsis, and zinnias. Other great nectar sources are members of the mint family like catmint, bee-balm, agastache, and salvia.

To get them to stay and lay eggs, you need the host plant specific to each variety of butterfly for the caterpillars to eat. The most noticeable butterflies in this area are the swallowtails, frittilaries and monarchs.

Swallowtail caterpillars feed on members of the carrot family like dill, fennel, parsley and carrot greens. I always plant several parsley plants in my herb garden so I have some to share.

Monarch caterpillars feed exclusively on member of the milkweed family. Asclepias tuberosa, the orange flowered butterfly weed is a wonderful perennial for most gardens, swamp milkweed will tolerate wetter sites, and there is a wonderful annual milkweed, Asclepias curassavica that stays tender into the fall to feed the last generation each summer in preparation for the migration. Toxins in the milkweed provides the adults with protection from predators.

Fritillaries, the delicate orange and black speckled ones with some white markings, drink the nectar of milkweeds, thistles, and members of the daisy family. The larvae, however, feed on violets.

Don’t neglect shrubs in your butterfly garden. Besides butterfly bushes, try including purple ninebarks, vitex, elderberry, lilacs, sumac, or blueberries as nectar sources. Our native hydrangea arborescens is a nectar source for skippers. In addition to supplying nectar, woodies can be a larval food. The spring azure butterfly larva feed on a variety of viburnums. Silver spotted skippers caterpillars dine on Lespedeza, or bush clover. Native deciduous azaleas host a large variety of butterflies, both as nectar and larval food sources. Buttonbush, in addition to attracting waterfowl , is a nectar source for viceroys and skippers. The stately Red-Spotted Purple Admiral and the White Admiral caterpillars feed on the leaves of willows, birches, wild cherries, and shad-bush (Amelanchier). The adults feed on rotting fruit, carrion and animal waste. On second thought, try not to attract those to your yard.

Monarch butterflies should be reaching this area about now, where they will spend the summer before migrating the thousand miles back to the jungles of Mexico. Be kind to these winged beauties and you can enjoy them through the lazy days of summer.

     Unless you are an active member of the Rip van Winkle sleeping club, you are certainly aware of the pollution problems of the Chesapeake Bay and the mixed reviews the cleanup efforts have received. Fingers of blame point in dozens of directions including the home landscape.
      In our backyard, Maryland has recently enacted legislation which, if duplicated here, would impact on our gardening efforts. I would generally agree with the proposal, but am troubled when education fails and government steps in.
The provision aimed at the home gardeners would limit the potency of the ingredients in fertilizer sold to the general public. I guess the logic is that if you normally use six bags of fertilizer, you will still use six bags of fertilizer, which will reduce the runoff potential because you used less fertilizer. The rules get uglier for professional landscaper and golf course operators.
      Granted, Maryland has more at stake with bay shoreline and has a long history of more active government, but Pennsylvania, I think, supplies over half the water to the bay. Will Pennsylvania act or will the feds force their hand? Time will tell. Will water also enter the mix?
      Perhaps it would be timely to review our gardening decisions. Water and fertilizer are the keys to rapid plant growth and lush looking results, but the runoff from our efforts have been documented. The equation is quite simple. We pour on the fertilizer. We follow with lots of water. The water moves the fertilizer into or across the soil.
      As my readers know, I’m a fan of lean and mean plants, which can provide great beauty and, except for severe drought, can fend for themselves. It’s less work, less time (watering) and less cost for fertilizer. I repeat my often offered claim.
     If you are a heavy or daily waterer, let me suggest you reduce your watering in half. After several weeks when you see no difference, cut it in half again and you will be doing yourself and the environment a favor.
      The alternative of lush, fat and happy plants fueled by lots of fertilizer and water has lots of fans. Insects and diseases love lush plants because the plant sacrifices its built in defenses in favor of rapid growth.
      Many plant sellers like them, too. Excesses of water and fertilizer build lush tops while limiting root growth. The ideal growing soil contains significant amounts of air as well as water. Lose the air and you lose or limit the roots. Poor roots and our usual winters equal a trip to the nursery for replacements.
      Recently I suggested that the more you spray the more you need to spray. The same is true with water. As the top growth outpaces root development the plant will appear to need even more water.
      It is my hope that we educate ourselves into better gardeners before someone, who probably doesn’t know which end of the hoe goes into the ground, tells us how to do it.

     Although more than 50 years have passed, I still remember my first chemical bath. In fact, I’m sure I could still get you within 25 feet of where it happened.
      Dad’s fledgling orchard included peaches, apples and two cherry trees. As today, brown rot topped the list of cherry problems. I was deemed big enough to man the tractor while dad dragged a hose and spray gun behind. Dad was intent on one of the cherry trees when a sudden gust of air did the job.
      That was the start of a 35 year period when I spent a lot of time with agricultural chemicals. At the start, chemicals enjoyed almost deity status. By the end, the fall from grace was almost complete.
      The fall really started in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. That led to the banning of DDT which was the start of radical changes in agriculture chemicals. Ironically, the general public didn’t turn on chemicals until at least 20 years after the book.
      Carson rightly claimed that the chemicals in the food chain led to soft shelled bird eggs and the rapid demise of the bald eagle and many hawks. Today there is a significant effort to restore populations of condors (a super large vulture) to the western states.
      Part of the program is to breed captive birds for release. Right now they are finding that the released birds are laying soft shelled eggs while the captive birds are laying normal eggs. The research team simply switch the eggs, hatching he soft shelled eggs as in a hatchery while giving the wild birds eggs from the captive birds.
      Along the chemical trail, I will never forget 1972. That year they banned lead arsenic. Now I doubt that it is too difficult to imagine that that one was a nasty insect killer. What I remember was growers wailing that they couldn’t continue growing fruit without it. Obviously, they were wrong.
      In the beginning, we took our baths relishing the prospects of a real shower when we were finished. By the end, the we wore respirators and protective clothing, but the real showers still beckoned when we finished.
      By 1980 the industry had gotten religion, using scouting, integrated pest management and reduced application rates. In fact, in those few years, while I expanded my orchard and vegetable production, I cut my chemical bill in half. To the general public in the mid 1980ies that wasn’t good enough.
      Since then, agricultural chemicals have continued to be more targeted and the pounds of chemicals used as been greatly reduced.
      I offer that bit of history before making a few observations based on my experience.
1. Chemicals were and most likely are still over-used in our gardens, lawns and farm fields.
2. Fungicides are probably needed to control rots, blights and apple scab.
3. Insecticides are seldom needed in the home garden or home orchard. Yes, I admit I don’t currently grow potatoes or sweet corn.
4. Most herbicides (weed killers) available to the general public are rather benign and have little lasting environmental impact.
5. Finally I’m sure that the more you spray the more you will need to spray especially when targeting insects. The vast majority of insects are beneficial. Don’t kill the good guys.