Fertilizing Dogwoods & Protecting Petunias
We have Mary in North Canton who asks, “My first question is, what kind of fertilizer should we use on the dogwood trees? The other thing, we have yellow petunias. And we have Japanese beetles only on the yellow petunias. Not the bubblegum, but just the yellow ones.”
That’s a great question. And the best fertilizer we’ve found to use on them, we use them on our own dogwood here,is the all-season fertilizer we sell. It’s been six months, so you can still use that right now. Put it down on the plant. Water it in really good. And then every time it rains, it gives the plant a little bit more food.
Now, depending on the age of the dogwood will depend on how much you use. A younger dogwood, about five scoops. An older dogwood, seven to eight scoops. There’s a scooper. There’s a scooper inside the bag.
The all-season can be used now. We use it pretty much all the way up. Once we get into September, then we start to use something different, because we don’t want it to feed it too far into the winter months. But by using it now, it’ll be kind of petering out towards the end. And that’s exactly what you want to happen.
For the beetles, they tend to kind of congregate on certain things. They like red leaf things, too. So that is strange. They tend to just follow each other.
There’s a couple of different things for that problem, I like to use neem oil spray, just because it’s not very caustic, and it’s organic. There is a product called Eight that will take them out, too. But they’re both sprays but they will take out the beetles.
You would always want to spray in the evening hours, just because the heat of the sun can cause damage with the chemicals. So you spray at 7, 8 o’clock at night. The two products are Eight, like the number, and then neem oil. So either one of those will be effective.
I like neem oil, too, just because it’s a pretty broad spectrum, too. It’ll be good for other things, too.
And we keep both those products at both locations.
Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).
