Avant Gardener: Plant mums to keep beds colorful this fall

  • By Kyle Valentini
  • August 23, 2011
  • 246
                        
Summary: Keep your flower beds colorful as summer fades to fall with a variety of mums in colors like red, orange, yellow and purple. Proper watering and spacing will keep mums looking fresh until the first frost. The start of school signifies the unofficial start to fall even though the season doesn’t actually begin until September 23 at 5:05 a.m. Another sign that summer is fading to fall is the onset of madness caused by spending entirely too much time with your school-aged children and the availability of the common hardy mum at local nurseries and garden stores. Mums are actually called chrysanthemums and are the birth flower for those born in November. They also serve as the official flower for the city of Chicago whose mayor probably describes them with expletives just because he can. After pulling what seemed like an endless amount of weeds from the flower beds this weekend and removing spent flowers like cosmos and zinnia, there is plenty of room to add hardy mums to keep the beds lush and colorful until the inevitable first frost. It is not difficult to grow mums from seed but they do require space, lots of light and pinching back…where you cut back the plant to make it bushier as it grows. With so many reliable growers right here in Ohio, I simply buy mums in pots when they become available. Mums do well in containers, hanging baskets or when planted directly in the ground. They prefer full sun and will become leggy if they do not receive at least six hours of sun each day. There is no need to fertilize mums once they begin to flower and in fact, fertilizing them after flowering begins will make them less likely to over winter well. Mums are perennials and can be successfully over wintered if they are watered well in the fall, dead headed and mulched with 4-6 inches of loose mulch like straw. I have completely neglected them in sheltered beds around my house and they still continue to reappear each spring, usually before the weeds. Most people treat them as annuals and this keeps the growers in business. Mums that have over wintered have a strong root system and can thrive with pinching back the branches several times throughout the growing season. Mums develop flower buds at the ends of branches. Pinching them back allows more branches to develop, more buds to develop and the plants stay compact and bushy. Pinching back two and perhaps three times is all that is required to get the desirable bushy plants. It is best to pinch back when the plant is about 6 inches tall. Pinch again when 6 more inches of growth appears. It isn’t wise to pinch back after mid July or you’ll pinch of the developing flower buds, nor is it wise for me to use the word pinch so many times in one paragraph. If you desire larger flowers you can pinch off some of the developing buds. If all this sounds like too much work you can simply toss them in the compost pile and buy new ones each year. There are more than 5000 named varieties of mums grown all over the world. Ohio’s climate is not suitable for all of them but you can still find many varieties worth showcasing in the garden or flower beds. The most common variety grown in our region is the decorative mum. They have large double or semi-double blooms on medium height plants. There are other varieties available at specialty nurseries that might include the Anemone, Button, Cushion, Daisy, Quill, Spider and Spoon. Mums are relatively pest and disease resistant but can succumb to damage from very hungry caterpillars, aphids, grasshoppers and spittlebugs and can have various fungal issues with long Latin names that are usually avoided by watering the proper amount, using clean garden tools and having your black thumb surgically removed and replaced with a green one.


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