If lawn removal is your goal, July is an excellent month for solarization or mechanically removing the sod and allowing the summer heat and lack of moisture to kill any remaining bits. Remember to cover your bare soil with mulch, cardboard or weed cloth until fall planting time to avoid opportunistic weeds becoming the lawn replacement! Nature does not like bare soil. Bare soil is also susceptible to wind erosion, which robs your garden of its best topsoil, tiny grains at a time.
Bermuda grass is actively growing now, making July a good month to kill it with selective grass herbicide such as sethoxydim or fluazifop. Wear proper protection and don’t allow any chemical to drift on desirable grass species like lawn, ornamental grass or other plants listed on the label.
Continue dead-heading roses and day lilies. Remove spent flower heads and the entire flowering stem from hydrangea, leaving only a few buds per stem for next year. Prune spent berry canes to the ground after harvesting. Trellis new canes as they emerge. Lightly prune bougainvillea to promote more flowers. Wait until the weather cools for major pruning unless it’s for safety. You can lightly prune in the cool morning or evening hours, but not if a heat wave is predicted in the next few days. Damage from weather events or overpruning often doesn’t show up in plants until months later, making it hard for us mere humans to always associate decline with its cause.
Do not fertilize anything (including lawns) with high-nitrogen products during July. Allow plants that want to go partially or fully summer dormant to do so to extend their lives and keep them healthy. This includes many of our best climate-adapted plants: California native species like Cleveland sage, blue eyed grass, and bush lupin, and Mediterranean species like lavender.
Monitor and control weeds, rodents and insect pests. For insects, hose off plants as a first treatment. Insecticidal soap sprayed in the evening is the second treatment. We are all busy and would rather do a one-time-and-done style of pest management, but gardening is like caring for other living beings: steady observation and small corrections are the key to a garden full of beneficial wildlife, resilient plants, and happy humans.
Conserving: Native bees and wasps are active in the summer months. Most of these tiny insects are hardly noticed because European honeybees are also active. Leave flowering (“bolting”) plants like radish, onion, and carrots for beneficial insects, and if you can, leave a little bare dirt here and there for ground-nesting solitary bees. Reduce or eliminate use of non-specific insecticides to avoid harming beneficial insects. Tolerate spiders, and let them eliminate some of your garden pests. Adding a top dressing of compost is never wrong but you can wait until fall to add more mulch, especially if you already have a thick layer. Take care of the millions of creatures living in your garden’s soil to have healthier plants. A garden in balance needs few chemicals and is less work, more pleasure.
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