Tips for the Season
Landscapes
At this time of the year, if you have not done it already, it is time to prepare your landscapes for the long cold Winter days. Mulch in your perennial gardens to ensure biennials and certain herbs come up for their second year. Wrap your rose bushes, trees, and the base of your climbers with burlap and fill with leaves or stuff with newspaper to ensure they survive. Now is the time to think about your second application of Wilt Pruf. Wilt Pruf should be sprayed on all your coniferous and evergreen shrubs, basically anything that maintains a leaf or needle. Once we have a day where the temperature is above freezing we thoroughly recommend a second application because in our area the second half of our Winter is typically the harshest.
Trees and Shrubs
Fruit trees such as Apples, Pears, Peaches, Plums, etc should be pruned back now. Don’t panic because you typically have until the fifteenth of March to do so, depending on when it begins to warm up.
It would definitely be beneficial to cover your coniferous shrubs with some type of deer or bird netting. At this time of the year with the natural food supply of the deer being so low they will look to your landscapes for their meals. Aside from applying netting you could also get into a schedule of spraying your landscapes with one of several different types of repellants to hinder the deer and prevent any damage.
Seed Starting
January is the month you should be planning and beginning your perennials, annuals, vegetables, and herbs from seed. From seed starting mixes, to biodegradable peat pots, to E-Z grow greenhouses, and heated seed germinating mats. The Gardener’s Center is your one stop shop for ushering in the 2010 Spring season by preparing and planting your seeds. It is very simple to begin your vegetables, herbs, annuals, and perennials by seed, and the way our economy has been recently it is also the most cost effective way to expand your landscapes. Then come late April early May all that is left for you to do is take the peat pots that the seedlings are growing in and plant them directly in the ground at the pre-established location.
Lawns
At this point in the year there really is not much you should be doing to your lawn. If you have not limed your lawn yet, it can still be done. It takes two to three months for lime to adjust the pH of your soil, therefore doing so now would make your soil’s pH balanced in time for the grasses awakening from its dormant stage. (we offer FREE pH SOIL TESTING)
Dormant seeding is the process of casting down seeds during the Winter knowing that the seed will not be germinating until Spring. What happens is at the earliest possible time, when temperatures reach forty-five to fifty degrees during the night, the seed will begin to germinate. This is basically the process that grass goes through in nature, the crop seeds sow themselves into the soil during the Fall and what does not germinate that Fall sits until the earliest possible time the following Spring.