Farmers Weekly Review

I think Mother Nature has had her calendar on the wrong page quite a bit this year. And nature is all in a tizzy, confused about what month it is.

In the last few weeks, I have had several reports and photos of their spring blooming shrubs in partial bloom. Lilacs, magnolias, forsythia are all sporadically sending out their spring blooms like a bad Fourth of July fireworks show.

I even noticed on my way to work a few lilacs that were in full out, Mother’s Day bloom. So what is going on? Why would plants bloom six months early, totally out of sync? It is because they are programmed to respond to certain powerful nature stimuli — the light/dark cycle and temperature changes.

I have often talked about the power of the seed and all the information packed into that little, tiny, amazing package of nature. All plants and their cycles act on a hard-wired response system built into them. From the specific time and temperature every seed germinates, to the bloom times and fruiting times of our food. And also to completing their life cycle.

This is not a choice for plants, but a destiny. So what does this have to do with lilacs flowering now? After all, it has been a horrifically hot summer. And I just wrote about how ahead of schedule all of our perennial plants this year because of the increase in soil and air temperature were.

Well, it works the same going the other way. Do you remember a few weeks ago in late August and early September when we had that unseasonably cool weather? It was a respite from the terrible heat. And it was my favorite weather — all the windows open — for at least a week. Some nights, the temps were so chilly, it dipped into the 40s here in Will County.

Pair that with what most people consider the depressing part of every day after June 21 (Summer Solstice), the slow march of less sunlight and more darkness every day. So what are those lilacs and other spring shrubs “thinking”?

Cool temps and a light/dark cycle similar to mid-spring — time to unfurl those flowers. Here we are! And that is it. Nature’s indicators mimicked their normal bloom time, so a few (or many blossoms) have graced us with their beauty. But what does this do to the plant long-term? And what about flowering in the spring?

Fortunately, the news is good, for the most part. The overall health of these spring flowering shrubs will not be impacted at all. The plants will eventually go dormant, particularly after frost, and they will be no worse for wear next year. But there is one thing …

All of these plants create the flower buds for the next year, the year before. This isn’t always easy to understand. So your lilacs that bloomed (early this year) in mid to late April, started putting on new growth above where those lilac flowers were.

These new branches that grew this year since mid-April all the way until they stopped putting on additional growth around June 30, is the location of next year’s flower buds. Or what we thought would be next year.

Some of these new flower buds were “tricked” by the early false fall and decided to bloom now. And they only have one opportunity to bloom. So the slight downside of this spring bloom fall is that you will not have flowers in the spring on any stem that blooms now.

This isn’t particularly drastic for most of the reports of sporadic blooms I have received this year, like the photos featured in this article from my neighbor Jim Chuporak’s lilacs that were planted back in the 1950s at his family home. They only had a few blooms show up.

But for some, like those reporting full out spring bloom on their saucer magnolias. Well let’s just say they are going to have to pick another spot for their spring holiday family photos. Because all of the flowers have jumped the gun — they had no choice, really — and that magnolia will not have any blossoms next year.

It isn’t harmful to the plants, but who grows a magnolia for the leaves? No, it is that amazing huge pink blossom explosion and that great fragrance. The good news is that most likely, all of these spring flowering shrubs will go back to their regular bloom cycle the following year, until we have another year of weather out of sync.

On an unrelated but important landscape issue to watch out for: Many homeowners are reporting skunk digging damage to their lawns. If your turf looked fine all summer, but suddenly you wake up to a land mine look, you have grubs.

Usually, we get grubs much earlier in the season — late August. But we have been really, really dry. Some suggested we would have a low/no grub year, because the ground was so hard the mother beetles could not lay eggs (which become grubs) this year. Well, we were fooled again!

When it is extremely hot, the grubs go deep into the soil to insulate themselves from the heat, but at night, will come up to turf roots and munch away. The real telltale sign of grubs is if you pull at the top of your dry brown turf anytime after August, and it rolls back like a rug, you have grubs.

So, what to do? If you do nothing, you will be reseeding or resodding any of those areas. That turf will never ever come back. No roots. Grubs can do small spots, but also you can lose large sections of turf to them if you do nothing.

Now is the time to apply Dylox. This is a short-acting, quick-kill treatment for grubs. It is not the time to get products like Grub Ex or Grub b Gon. Those products take weeks to become effective and should have been applied around the fourth of July.

Nancy Kuhajda is the University of Illinois Extension Horticulture Educator for Will, Kankakee, and Grundy Counties. She is also a garden writer and lecturer on all things gardening and nature in Northern Illinois. You can contact her at [email protected].