Agriculture

Rep. Brad Montell, R-Shelbyville (58th District), applauded Shane Greenwell of the Spencer County Future Farmers of America for being named one of 10 national winners in the FFA’s Agri-Entrepreneurship Contest sponsored by the USDA Rural Development.

There are many gardening tasks that must be done or are better done in the fall of the year.  Things like cleaning up old plant material; fertilizing trees, shrubs and lawns; and protecting tender plants like hybrid tea roses and French hydrangeas.  These chores are all a part of garden maintenance and taking care of them now will improve the quality of your garden later.  Here’s a checklist to remind you of what needs to be done to get the garden ready for winter:

It’s time to clean up the bramble patch:  in order to maintain healthy and productive blackberries and raspberries we need to prune out the old to make room for the new.   
Most brambles are biennial which means they fruit on second-year growth.  Blackberries are easy to deal with, just remove the arching canes that fruited this year and trim up and trellis the new growth from this summer which will bear next summer’s fruit.  Repeat the same thing next year.