How to Landscape With Mums

Chrysanthemums offer brilliant-colored blossoms in the fall.

Just as other flowers are drooping and loosing their blossoms, Mother Nature puts on a brilliant display with garden mums (Dendranthema grandiflora) in the fall. These flowers, also known as chrysanthemums or hardy mums, offer autumnal colors such as red, rust, orange and yellow, as well as lavender, cream and even chartreuse. Landscaping with mums involves planting and raising them under the best conditions for rewarding results in the fall.

Things You'll Need

• Complete garden fertilizer
• Fungicide
• Fumigant
• Insecticide

Instructions

1. Plant garden mums in the spring. This gives them the entire summer to grow and become established, increasing their odds of surviving the cold the following winter.

2. Find a place in your yard where mums will get plenty of sunshine, but allow them time in the dark at night. Don't plant them where yard lights or outside house lights will interfere with natural rhythms of light and dark, or they will have trouble growing and blooming properly.

3. Feed your mums the nutrients they need to be robustly productive. Choose any standard complete garden fertilizer, such as a 5-10-5 or 5-10-10, and apply it according to the directions by the manufacturer. Stop fertilizing once you notice buds developing.

4. Water your mums daily. In the hottest part of summer, water them two or more times a day, but don't let them stand in water. The soil should be well drained.

5. Protect your mums from pests and diseases. Fungi such as powdery mildew and rust plague some mums. Pests that damage or kill mums include aphids, mites and nematodes. Apply a fungicide, fumigant and/or insecticide as needed to control them.

Tips & Warnings

• Pinch out the tops of garden mums within a few weeks of being planted in the yard. This forces them to grow new branches. A few weeks later, pinch out the tops of the new branches, but stop pinching around the middle of July in the northern states or the middle of August in the South. Your garden mums should produce a dense array of flowers as a result.

• Mums vary greatly in appearance, with some producing large, round, compact blooms, while others produce spiked blossoms or flowers with long, slender petals.

References

• Ohio State University Extension: Growing Chrysanthemums
• Fine Gardening: Chrysanthemums
• Ohio State University Extension: Disease Control in the Landscape
• Alabama Cooperative Extension Service: Fall Garden Mum Production in Alabama

Resources

• University of Florida IFAS Extension: Dendranthema x Grandiflora Garden Mum, Garden Chrysanthemum