• Harvest your vegetables on a regular basis to keep quality high. You can still plant southern peas, eggplant, and okra for mid-summer vegetables. Use a Bt product to control hornworms, fruit-eating pinworms, and other caterpillars. Pull non-producing plants, especially the tomatoes--before diseases and spider mites move in and put them in the compost pile. Powdery mildew will probably take the viney plants this month. Pull them out and wait for fall.
• Select the color and the height of mature crape myrtles you want by choosing from the hybrid, disease-resistant varieties. Local nurserymen will have this listing of crape myrtle characteristics.
• Cut, mow or pull suckers from the roots of trees (such as Live Oaks) don't use herbicides, it will damage the mother tree as well.
• Chinch bugs can appear in lawns, especially on Bermudagrass, anything from now through late summer. Floratam St. Augustinegrass is chinch bug resistant.
• Irrigate the lawn grass only if it hasn't rained in the last two weeks, and then no more than 3/4 inch of water on St. Augustinegrass (less for Zoysia, Bermuda, and Buffalo grasses). Water only the most important part of your lawn and let the rest go dormant until we get rain. Keep the mower blade sharp. If you had grub or chinch bug problems last year, treat the lawn at the end of the month, just follow the directions on the bag.
  
  
  David Rodriguez is County Extension Agent-Horticulture with Texas Cooperative Extension in Bexar County. For more information, call the Master Gardener "Hotline" (210) 467-6575 or visit our County Extension website at http://bexar-tx.tamu.edu.
  

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