5 things to do in the garden this week:

1. Fruit trees. Plant a Chinese date tree (Zizyphus jujube). It grows well when planted at this time of year. The Chinese date is an extremely drought-resistant tree, better than any other locally grown fruit tree, and has two special characteristics that set it apart from other fruit trees. It has glossy green foliage and a columnar habit. It does have thorns, but these are small and easy to forget about when you taste the fruit. Unlike the familiar dates that grow on a palm tree and must be picked before they dry and become sweet, Chinese dates dry on the tree, which grows fairly quickly in our climate to a height of about 30 feet. It sheds its leaves briefly in winter, but does not need winter cold to flower and bear fruit. The fruit begins to ripen this month and continues to ripen until October. Plant it as an exotic hedge against a wall or along a property boundary.

2. Vegetables. You can still plant tomatoes, but they may not be as productive as if you planted them a month ago or earlier. But you never know. It depends on how warm the temperatures are over the next 2-3 months. Cherry tomato production has been known to continue until the first of the new year, if not beyond. And it would be wise to plant cherry tomatoes at this late date, as they ripen faster than large tomato varieties.

3. Herbs. Most Artemisia species, or wormwoods, are known for their bitter smell, but annual mugwort (Artemisia annua) is an exception. Its foliage smells like camphor, chamomile, mint, and thyme. The foliage is soft and lacy, and the flowers appear in early fall. All parts of the plant are medicinal. Chinese scientist Tu Youyou extracted a phytochemical called artemisinin from the leaves and developed a method to use it as an antimalarial drug—a discovery for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Mugwort is probably the easiest herb to grow. Simply sprinkle the seeds, which are widely available from online retailers, on the soil surface and water them. Within a week or two, the plants will begin to grow. They also self-seed easily, so you can distribute the seedlings that sprout from your mother plant to neighbors and friends.

4. Ornamental plants. In the 1936 Armstrong Plant Catalog, a 3- to 4-foot-tall ornamental called Mexican Abelia (Abelia floribunda) was described as follows: “It has beautiful glossy foliage and blooms in late spring in profusion of drooping, tubular, reddish-purple flowers, much larger and brighter than those of the other Abelias. If pruned back a little, it will produce another crop in late summer. It causes quite a stir among connoisseurs of the most beautiful flowering shrubs.” I have never seen this shrub anywhere, but there are plenty of stunning pictures of it on the Internet and it is available from online retailers.

5. Affordable garden. If you want to install such a system, it is easy to do with a drip irrigation line and cuttings from succulents. Simply lay the drip line where you want your succulent garden to be and take cuttings from family, friends and neighbors’ plants (after getting their permission to propagate), removing the lower leaves from the cuttings as you go. After letting the cut ends woody for a few days or more and they no longer appear moist, stick the stems next to where a drip irrigation tube is in the line. Within a year or so, you will see your cuttings start to look like the plants they are supposed to be.

Send your questions, comments, successes and garden problems to [email protected].