GRAND TRAVERSE COUNTY, Mich., (WPBN/WGTU) — It’s been very dry across the area lately, creating drought conditions in some spots. With fall being the best time to prepare your garden for spring, local gardeners are sharing advice on how to protect plants during the dry weather.
Drought conditions can wear on your plants and trees, but Terry Bertrand, co-owner of Barker Creek Nursery and Gardening in Williamsburg, says it can be manageable, but timing plays a part.
“If we go through droughts, what happens is a lot of trees just quit growing,” Bertrand said. “They take all that delicate new growth, and they harden off. The buds are already produced for next season, so they’re ready to go. They just fall asleep; they might be a little stressed out. But they’re in good shape, you know, to get through the winter and get out of the spring.
The latest drought monitor shows expansion in areas near and south of M-55 where moderate and even severe drought conditions exist. Thankfully, some rain this weekend, but it likely won’t be anywhere near enough to make the drought conditions go away any time soon.
“The roots are much deeper than what the water goes down,” Barker Creek Co-Owner Gordon Coy said. “So, when we’re in a drought situation, it’s good to take a hose and put on top of the root ball and then water for 45 to 50 minutes at a slight trickle. That way the water saturates down to the deepest roots.”
And even with dry conditions, this is a good time of year to get some things done.
“Some things be a little bit better when transplanting in the fall like peonies, your hostas, your iris,” Bertrand said. “So that would be a fair game that this time of year. But if you can get a shovel in the ground, and you can avoid getting air pockets when you’re planting, you can plant until the frost is pretty heavy in the soil.”
Along with less rain, the growing season was a challenge for a different reason.
Coy says there’s also another challenge making it harder to keep gardens protected this year.
“This year has been a terrible year for funguses. It’s affected fruit trees, fruit bushes and some cases even called plants to defoliate early,” Coy said. “What we want to do is we want to preemptively watch for those to tackle those fungus early in the spring.”
A cold, damp spring like we had this past spring, followed by warm and dry summer conditions are the prime weather conditions for fungi to appear in gardens.
Experts suggest composting, keeping mineralization and use fungicide treatments three to four times in the spring.
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