Brighten up the indoors with cut flowers

This is a good time to cut some of your outdoor flowers for indoor display. It is best to cut the flowers during a cool part of the day and to put them in water as quickly as possible.

Remove any foliage that will be under the water in the vase. Keep your arrangements in a cool room out of direct sunlight. Adding a preservative to the water can lengthen the life of the flowers.

It is most important to make a fresh cut on the stems and immediately put them in water.

• If you want to maximize the size of your dahlia flowers, keep the main stems free of side shoots, allowing only the terminal bud to develop, which results in one flower per stem. This will be most effective when growing large, dinner plate-sized cultivars.

The large dahlias will need some support to prevent wind damage and the stems breaking from the weight of the flowers.

• Grubs can be a problem in lawns some years. The adult beetles will be attracted to irrigated lawns that are surrounded by dry lawns for their egg laying in early summer. If the season is dry and you are the only one watering the lawn on the block, you will have a greater chance of having grubs.

Your lawn may or may not have a problem with grubs this year, so deciding not to apply grub control will not necessarily result in a grub infestation. Typically, when there are eight to 12 grubs per square foot, visible damage will occur as they feed on the roots of the grass. The lawn will brown out later in the season when hot and dry weather increases stress on the lawn. Raccoons and skunks will dig in lawns to eat the grubs - this digging is often the first sign of grubs.

Be sure to read the label carefully to make sure you are using the right grub product at the right time of year. Products designed to prevent grubs are generally applied late June to mid-July. There are products designed for quick kill of grubs and are applied later in the season when grubs reach a threshold in the lawn that is causing damage.

There is no need to control the small number of grubs that the lawn can withstand or automatically treat for them every year. It's very important to use an insecticide labeled for grubs at the proper time of year.

• Tim Johnson is director of horticulture at Chicago Botanic Garden, chicagobotanic.org.