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When choosing what to water now, consider conservation. Established plants such as trees and shrubs that have been planted for more than 3 years, and are drought tolerant, do not require extra watering. In order to conserve water, keep the focus on "water lovers" and new landscape plants.
Plants that ordinarily require extra summer water, such as rhododendrons and azaleas, definitely need it now. These spring blooming plants are setting bud now and drought may reduce next year's bloom. Water deeply and slowly. If the landscape is new, with plants installed during 1999 or 2000, be sure that the new plantings receive adequate water while roots are becoming established.
Until the fall rains come, plants will continue to show signs of stress leading to early dormancy. Browning of deciduous leaves on trees is a protective adaptive reaction and quite normal. Leaves may even drop early. It's normal. These older, established plants are taking care of themselves. Extra water isn't necessary and it won't keep trees from dropping leaves prematurely.
Fall gardening advice often includes suggestions for "adding organic matter." Garden soils in western Washington frequently contain pockets of sand, piles of gravel rubble, or clay deposits rather than the organic matter that helps to support good plant growth. The best additions to our soils are composted materials such as shredded leaves, processed yard waste, or home made compost, all of them broken down before adding. "Rough" compost contains some recognizable elements of the original materials but has gone through considerable decomposition.
Sawdust is organic, an obvious by product of lumber processing. However, for the necessary breakdown process to occur, the sawdust requires nitrogen. Gardeners know that fresh or new sawdust can cause a shortage in available plant nutrients by using nitrogen from the ground, pulling it away from plants.
If you do wish to spread raw or undecomposed sawdust, add some extra nitrogen to help the break-down process, and be sure to wet the sawdust thoroughly. For every cubic yard of raw sawdust, add nitrogen. If you use organic fertilizers, you can add kelp meal or cottonseed meal to the sawdust, at about 20 pounds per 1 cubic yard. If you use processed nitrogen fertilizer, add it carefully and be certain not to place the sawdust where the nitrogen will leach into any body of water.
The amounts of processed fertilizer are: 1 cubic yard sawdust, plus 14 pounds of 21-0-0 (ammonium sulfate) or 9 pounds of 33-0-0. (ammonium nitrate.) The sawdust plus nitrogen can be tilled into garden soil for next spring's vegetable garden or into any place where the garden is empty and fallow. It will break down over winter into a useful soil amendment.
Adding grass clippings in quantity to a pile of fresh sawdust will also provide you with good springtime mulch after the materials break down. Or you can leave the sawdust plus nitrogen fertilizer in a pile to compost. (Wet it and cover the pile with a tarp during winter to prevent leaching of the nitrogen.)
Another great source of soil conditioning falls naturally as leaves come down from trees. Nitrogen will also help the leaves break down into compost. Use about a quarter of the amount added to the sawdust: to one cubic yard of packed leaves, add about 3.5 pounds of 21-0-0 or 2 pounds 33-0-0. Again, as with the sawdust, the leaves will break down faster if wet.
I use leaves for winter mulch, piling them on the garden about 4 inches deep over the perennial and shrub borders and just allowing winter to work them down. Avoid heaping them over the crowns or up against the stems of plants. Lay them out carefully around the plants. I don't add nitrogen to the leaves when spreading them in fall, but do side-dress the plants with fertilizer when spring growth begins.
Bare soil suffers in winter from rain compaction and weed emergence, so get those organic mulches going!
Many gardeners like to use cover crops in winter where soil would otherwise be left bare. Now is the time to plant them, in September when the ground is still warm. A cover crop is planted in fall and tilled into the ground in spring where it decays. The winter crop preserves soil from erosion in storms, and keeps down winter weeds. If you have a space that will be planted to lawn in spring, or an area waiting to be a landscape "eventually," a cover crop planted now can help to prepare the soil.
Several different seed combinations can be used for cover crops. Vetch mixed with annual rye grass or cereal rye provides both a legume for nitrogen-fixing and the rye for building humus. To seed 1000 square feet, combine 1.5 pounds of vetch seed with 2-3 pounds of rye grass seed. Be sure to till the resulting growth under in the spring just as it begins to bloom. Don't let it go to seed and get woody. Cover crops can be tough to manage if they get too mature before they are tilled in.
Hortsense: Managing plant problems with Integrated Pest Management
