Gardening This Weekend: December 26, 2024

I know you’re still sorting through the boxes and wrapping paper for any loose checks and gift cards – but keep the outdoors in focus as well.

PLANT
• Dig and transplant trees and shrubs that need new homes in your landscape. Keep the soil around their roots in place to help them recover.
• Fruit trees, grapes, and bramble berries. Buy varieties recommended for your area. I have them in my book Neil Sperry’s Lone Star Gardening, or the folks from Texas A&M’s Texas AgriLife Extension Service have them at this link.
• Seeds for frost-hardy annual flowers and vegetables in greenhouse. Do your homework ahead of time, however, crop by crop, so you’ll have the transplants ready at the right times.

PRUNE
• Mistletoe from small tree branches. Allowing it to stay will let it begin to root into the limbs until it becomes a serious problem.
• Grapes, peaches and plums. Apples can be trimmed to remove strongly vertical shoots. Figs and pears require very little pruning except to remove damaged branches. Wait to prune blackberry stems until you have completed harvesting this year’s crop in late spring. Details will come at that time.
• Overgrown shrubs can be pruned anytime in the next 5 or 6 weeks, but for most it can wait 2 to 4 weeks.

FERTILIZE
• High-phosphate, liquid root-stimulator fertilizer at time of planting bare-rooted and balled-and-burlapped fruit trees and landscape trees and shrubs.
• No need to fertilize flowering Christmas plants such as poinsettias, amaryllis and Christmas cacti. There is an ample supply from the grower left over in their soil.

ON THE LOOKOUT
• Weakened tree branches, trunks that might split during a winter ice or snowstorm. This might be a good time to have a certified arborist inspect your trees carefully.
• Watch seed levels in your bird feeders. Your visitors will eat like little pigs in cold weather. It’s a good idea to have multiple feeders so you can offer them a variety of foods, also to keep a better supply available at all times.