Sacramento Digs Gardening: Turn garden horror into Halloween fun

The Fremont Community Garden in midtown sports Halloween decorations during a contest last year. Use summer garden remains for your creepy decor. (Photo: Debbie Arrington)

Old vines, dried leaves, dead flowers become creative decorations

Gnarly vines, crackling dry leaves, decay everywhere; the remains of a summer garden look pretty scary right now.

If decorating for Halloween, those old tomato vines and dried cornstalks make for fast, cheap trimmings. (Just keep them outdoors in case they hide any creepy-crawly bugs. The spiders will be part of the ambiance.)

Add a few Halloween props (such as cardboard headstones) and a holiday display can become an effective little slice of garden variety horror.

Many vines work for this outdoor stagecraft. Besides tomato or squash vines, pruned grapevines (with or without withered leaves) and the appropriately named Virginia creeper look good and scary draped over railings or wrapped around posts (or a witch’s legs).

Put bunches of dead or dried flowers on those temporary gravesites. That’s an extra creepy touch.

Dried cornstalks and fresh pumpkins make a harvest-themed holiday display that can be friendly and festive (and last through Thanksgiving) or a little more foreboding for Halloween night. (But keep any jack-o-lantern candles away from the corn.)

My favorite Halloween touch: A vase of prickly rose stems a la Morticia Addams. No blooms? No problem. Cut off the foliage and any bloom remains, leaving a very thorny bouquet. (I’ve got several blood-thirsty candidates in my yard.)

Besides recycling garden remainders, choose decorations with your garden in mind. Straw bales, for example, do double duty. First, they serve as part of Halloween scenery. After that performance, straw makes excellent mulch for the winter garden.

If using as mulch, make sure it’s straw and not hay – or you will have another kind of horror story in your garden. Hay sprouts.

GENERAL GARDENING

An article about gardening.

Keywords:

gardening pumpkins Sacramento summer garden roses mulch fall gardening recycling Halloween

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Garden Checklist for week of Nov. 3

November still offers good weather for fall planting:

* If you haven't already, it's time to clean up the remains of summer. Pull faded annuals and vegetables. Prune dead or broken branches from trees.

* Now is the best time to plant most trees and shrubs. This gives them plenty of time for root development before spring growth. They also benefit from fall and winter rains.

* Set out cool-weather annuals such as pansies and snapdragons.

* Lettuce, cabbage and broccoli also can be planted now.

* Plant garlic and onions.

* Keep planting bulbs to spread out your spring bloom. Some possible suggestions: daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths, tulips, anemones and scillas.

* This is also a good time to seed wildflowers and plant such spring bloomers as sweet pea, sweet alyssum and bachelor buttons.

* Rake and compost leaves, but dispose of any diseased plant material. For example, if peach and nectarine trees showed signs of leaf curl this year, clean up under trees and dispose of those leaves instead of composting.

* Save dry stalks and seedpods from poppies and coneflowers for fall bouquets and holiday decorating.

* For holiday blooms indoors, plant paperwhite narcissus bulbs now. Fill a shallow bowl or dish with 2 inches of rocks or pebbles. Place bulbs in the dish with the root end nestled in the rocks. Add water until it just touches the bottom of the bulbs. Place the dish in a sunny window. Add water as needed.

* Give your azaleas, gardenias and camellias a boost with chelated iron.

* For larger blooms, pinch off some camellia buds.

* Prune non-flowering trees and shrubs while dormant.

* To help prevent leaf curl, apply a copper fungicide spray to peach and nectarine trees after they lose their leaves this month. Leaf curl, which shows up in the spring, is caused by a fungus that winters as spores on the limbs and around the tree in fallen leaves. Sprays are most effective now.

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