Wow those impatients are amazing. I don't think I have ever seen any that big before. Although it seems like all your landscaping is pretty amazing ... great colors

Funny timing, I was just going to start a post about how awful my double impatiens look this year. Most of mine are 18-24 inches tall by now, instead they look like they've been hit with the first 35 degree night. I noticed that my neighbors regular impatiens all look like crap too (at one house they even pulled them all out).

MorpheusPA wrote:Mine still look stellar, but temperatures are about to take a tumble on Sunday. That'll nick them a little bit, except the ones right under the window which last well into frost season.

Can't figure it out up here, had to be the combination of heat/rain. They are usually indestructible.

jglongisland wrote:

MorpheusPA wrote:Mine still look stellar, but temperatures are about to take a tumble on Sunday. That'll nick them a little bit, except the ones right under the window which last well into frost season.

Can't figure it out up here, had to be the combination of heat/rain. They are usually indestructible.

Mine looked like Morph's until a few weeks ago. I think all the rain has caused root rot as mine have all turned really light green, dropped leaves and flowers and look sad. They looked fantastic all year. I'm mid way through pulling them now. Still have about 600 or so to go... I rather have a clean look than sad looking flowers.

I have about 1200 of them (and about another 1300 of other annuals), next week I'm going to start pulling them out as I agree that I'd rather have clean looking soil than sickly flowers. The side benefit is that leaf cleanup will be much, much easier as the annuals are at the edges of all the beds. Last year the impatiens (and others) were thriving well into November. Makes it really hard to blow the leaves into the grass when they get stuck in annuals.

Ran into my perennial guy the other day. We were talking about the annuals dying out early. He said Cornell issued a bulletin about the acid level in the irene storms as being very high and the sulfur dioxide did a number of many types of annuals and has even done damage to the foliage on lots of trees. He started talking in really scientific latin terms and I got lost (he has a post graduate degree of University of Georgia in horticulture).

The storm apparently sucked up all the pollution on its way up here and dumped it down on us. Perhaps that's why the foliage is just off this year.

MorpheusPA wrote:Sounds reasonable (sounds horrible, actually, but I'll go with reasonable). Mine are still holding fine, although I buzzed through the gardens again and removed the dying stuff (it is, after all, mid-October).

Frost looks to be about the 23rd here, maybe. If so, that'll take things down.

Last year first frost was 11/28, we get close but the water north and south of us keeps us above freezing an extra 2-4 weeks.

This weekend I'm planting some hydgrangea (and relocated some maxi rhodi's that just don't look nice) and will pull another 2-3 garbage bags worth of annuals. I'll start cutting the perennials down in early November.