Fall foliage at home, struggling evergreens, and composting: This Weekend in the Garden – pennlive.com

The best trees and shrubs for fall foliage

Although fall officially arrives in late September, mid to late October is when it starts to feel like fall in the Pennsylvania landscape.

With cooling temperatures comes a shift in a lot of our tree and shrub foliage. As green chlorophyll breaks down, the other pigments that are in leaves start to show through at least for a few weeks until they also break down, leaving behind brown and falling leaves.

Were in one of the relative few parts of the world that has an ideal climate for blazing fall foliage.

Tourists come from afar (at least in non-pandemic years) to see Pennsylvanias forests in their red, orange, and gold fall glory. Red maple, sweetgum, blackgum, birch, oak, dogwood, and serviceberry are among the native tree species that are particularly vibrant in our native fall landscapes.

If you play your cards right, your own yard can be a riot of rich fall color, too.

Many of those same native tree species make excellent landscape specimens. If you add non-invasive, non-native species with good fall color to the mix, we have a lot to pick from in our Zone 6 to 7A growing zone. Among them:

Over 30 feet: assorted maples (red, gold, or red-bold blends); assorted oaks (gold or red/gold); ginkgo, river birch, linden, and katsura (yellow or gold), and blackgum and sweetgum (deep red).

Under 30 feet: Japanese, trident, paperbark and similar smaller maples (red, gold, or red-gold blends); dogwood (deep red); serviceberry (bright red); stewartia (red/gold blend); American hornbeam (orange-red), and parrotia, redbud, and American fringe tree (yellow or gold).

Lots of shrubs turn color as well and usually fall into the four- to eight-foot size ranges that are fine for typical home landscapes.

Some of the best fall-foliage shrubs to make your fall yard go out in a blaze of brilliance instead of a dribble of drabness include: fothergilla and panicle hydrangea (gold or gold/red); Virginia sweetspire, crape myrtle, sumac, nandina, and blueberry (blood red or bright red); oakleaf hydrangea, viburnum, bayberry, PJM rhododendron, and ninebark (deep red to burgundy); summersweet, spicebush, red-twig dogwood, winterberry holly, witch hazel, and bottlebrush buckeye (yellow to gold); chokeberry (red to red/gold), and spirea Ogon (rusty orange-red).

The yellowing needles on this pine are all on the inner part of the branches. The branch ends are sporting green. This is normal shedding of the older needles.

Needled evergreens have been taking a beating in central-Pennsylvania yards the last few years, especially needlecast diseases on Douglas firs and Colorado blue spruce as well as long-running troubles such as spider mites on dwarf Alberta spruce, woolly adelgids and scale on hemlocks, and bagworms on arborvitae.

Some of those can be treated with insecticides or even stiff sprays of water every now and then (which spider mites hate). Others (i.e. needlecast diseases) are difficult and/or expensive to control.

Some of the yellowing and browning you might be seeing on needled evergreens isnt trouble at all but a normal function of those trees this time of year.

Evergreens dont drop all of their foliage each year as do maples and dogwoods, but they do shed older and no-longer-needed needles from the inside as the age.

As new growth occurs toward the tips, the older needles nearer the trunk begin yellowing in fall and ultimately brown and drop.

This yellowing can be more pronounced in hot, dry years like we had this summer and with newly transplanted evergreens.

The way to tell the difference between normal needle yellowing/shedding and a more serious needlecast disease is where the needle loss is occurring.

If the tips are growing annually and producing new needles each spring while the inner parts of the branches are bare, no need to worry.

Native eastern white pines, for example, are particularly notorious for dropping copious quantities of their long needles in fall.

However, if needles have died at the tips or if branches are completely bare, thats a problem especially if the bareness is working its way up a tree. Needleless branches are often dead and eventually will go brittle and snap when you attempt to bend them.

A curveball is that with needlecast on Colorado blue spruce and Douglas fir, an infected tree will grow a new needles on the tips in spring while all of the older needles have browned from there on in. As the disease continues, that growth dies by the following year, and the whole branch is a goner.

Your local county Penn State Extension office and their Master Gardeners can help you figure out whats going on with your hurting evergreens. They get a lot of calls every year about yellowing white pines.

Penn States Master Gardeners get a lot of gardening questions of all sorts and have begun doing free monthly webinars to share answers to many of them. The program is called Garden Hotline Live, and episodes take place the second Friday of each month at noon. Recordings of past webinars are also available for free viewing later.

Penn States Plant Disease Clinic is another resource that helps diagnose plant diseases at no charge to Pennsylvania homeowners.

Compost bins can be made using skids or scrap lumber.

Nothing improves soil and aids plant health better than compost.

If you dont have one of these waste-recycling, soil-building stations in the yard, now is an excellent time to add one.

Leaves are one of the best compost-pile ingredients, and theyll be in prime supply shortly.

Composting is also an excellent way to recycle kitchen waste (coffee grounds, egg shells, potato peels, etc.) and assorted yard waste (frost-killed plants, grass clippings, and yanked weeds in addition to falling leaves).

Ideal composting spots are out-of-the-way corners of the yard or behind a shed or garage. If you have neither, create a compost closet by installing vine-covered trellises around one, two, or three sides of the compost bin(s).

Shoot for piles that are at least four feet tall and wide. Many gardeners keep two or three different piles at various stages of decomposition.

Bins arent absolutely necessary, but theyre helpful in keeping piles contained.

A simple system is to contain piles with cylinders of metal or plastic fencing. Used wooden skids can be wired together, or you can build your own bins out of scrap (or new) lumber. Or you can even use large trash cans with holes bored in the sides for aeration.

If youd rather buy than build, lots of ready-to-go composting gizmos are available in garden centers and catalogs, ranging from small plastic domes to $300 rotating drums on legs.

As for what to add to the piles, an ideal mix is a blend of high-nitrogen greens and high-carbon browns. A good proportion is three parts browns to one part green.

Good browns include shredded paper, fallen leaves, pine needles, sawdust, and wood chips.

Good greens include grass clippings, fresh weeds from the garden (ones that havent gone to seed), pulled or frost-killed garden plants, and assorted non-meat, non-dairy kitchen waste, such as coffee grounds, banana peels, carrot shavings, salad leftovers, and egg shells.

Toss in an occasional shovel full of finished compost or garden soil to supply microorganisms that help cook the materials.

You dont need to turn the pile, but doing so every now and then speeds up the decomposition process. So does chopping the materials into small pieces in the first place.

Water the pile when you first build it, then rain usually supplies enough moisture to keep the pile cooking.

With a good mix thats damp and turned, the pile should get hot enough to produce steam and be uncomfortable if you try to stick your hand in.

Otherwise, if youre a lazy composter, just pile up the ingredients, and let them rot. In a year, the materials on the bottom will have rotted into a crumbly, black, earthy-smelling compost thats ready to go on or in gardens and lawns.

Composting not only keeps waste out of landfills and the water-wasting garbage disposal, it yields a highly nutritious soil additive that improves drainage, adds life and organic matter to compacted soil, and even helps fight off some plant diseases.

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Fall foliage at home, struggling evergreens, and composting: This Weekend in the Garden - pennlive.com