Gardening This Weekend: October 17, 2024
Let’s start the preparations for late fall and winter. Here are this weekend’s goals.
PLANT
• Nursery stock. You’ll get some good bargains as garden centers reduce inventories before winter, plus it’s a great time for planting new trees and shrubs.
• Winter color annuals pansies, violas, pinks, snapdragons, ornamental cabbage and kale, and other cold-hardy plants. South Texas gardeners can add in stocks, English daisies, wallflowers, ornamental chard, calendulas, and petunias, among others.
• Finish dividing spring-flowering perennials very soon.
• Daffodils and grape hyacinths as soon as you buy them. Ice Follies, Carlton and other early- and small-flowering daffodils are far more successful at reblooming in successive springs than the large, late hybrids like King Alfred, Mount Hood and Unsurpassable.
• Buy tulips and Dutch hyacinths and refrigerate them for 45 days at 45 degrees before planting into landscape second half of December. They must have this “pre-chilling” to bloom properly.
PRUNE
• Dead or damaged branches from live oaks, red oaks and other shade trees before winter. Dead branches are brittle and heavy, likely to break under ice loads.
• Light trimming of shrubs to tidy up landscape, but save major reshaping for late winter.
• Keep mowing lawn at same height you’ve used all summer. Mowing removes fallen leaves so they don’t pack down. It also helps control weeds.
FERTILIZE
• Cool-season turf (fescue and rye) with all-nitrogen food to promote vigorous growth remainder of this growing season.
• Winter annuals with water-soluble, high-nitrogen food each time that you water them.
ON THE LOOKOUT
• Brown patch (large patch) in St. Augustine appears suddenly in round patches. Blades pull loose easily from runners. You’ll be able to see the decayed bases of the blades. Apply a fungicide labeled for turf diseases. Do not water at night.
• Apply glyphosate-only herbicide to turf and weedy areas where you intend to plant shrubs, groundcovers or vegetables come spring. It must be sprayed while unwanted vegetation is still green and growing.
• Watch roses for signs of rose rosette virus, and remove all parts of diseased plants. See information and photos at my website.