Gardening This Weekend: January 16, 2025
Here’s your list of assignments to tackle as soon as convenient.
PLANT
• Dig and transplant established trees and shrubs during the next 3-4 weeks while they are completely dormant. Maintain a ball of soil around their roots as you move them, and prune carefully to compensate for roots lost during the digging.
• Bare-rooted fruit trees, grape vines, and bramble berries. Ask your smart phone which varieties of each fruit crop Texas A&M recommends for your county.
• Cool-season annuals into patio pots and entryway and patio beds. The list includes sweet alyssum, larkspurs, wallflowers, pansies, violas, Iceland poppies, sweet peas, snapdragons and stocks, among others.
• Onion slips and snap-type English peas in next week in South Texas and the following week in Central and North Central Texas. Plant in raised beds with well-draining soils.
PRUNE
• Peach and plum trees. Goal is to maintain cereal-bowl shape while keeping the trees less than 10 ft. tall. Remove vertical shoots.
• Evergreen shrubs as needed to reshape, also to reduce their height and width by up to one-third. Use hand pruners and lopping shears to avoid an ugly sheared shape.
• Summer-flowering shrubs and vines but do so modestly. Heavy pruning stimulates rampant growth. That can prevent or delay blooming. That’s one of the main reasons not to “top” crape myrtles.
• Oaks to remove damaged or dead branches, notably those that were killed by the February 2021 cold spell. This pruning must be done before mid-February to lessen chance of invasion of oak wilt fungus. Cut surfaces must be sealed with pruning paint.
• Apples to remove strongly vertical shoots (“watersprouts”). Pears only to remove damaged or rubbing branches.
• Grapes to remove 80 to 85 percent of canes and maintain vines on strong supports.
• Wait to prune blackberries until after harvest. Do not prune figs except to remove damaged branches.
FERTILIZE
• Houseplants monthly with diluted high-nitrogen, water-soluble fertilizer.
• Winter annual color with high-nitrogen, water-soluble plant food to promote new growth during winter warm spells.
• Asparagus beds with ammonium sulfate or other fast-release nitrogen granules now to promote vigorous growth of spears in February.
• High-phosphorus, liquid root stimulator fertilizer monthly to newly transplanted trees and shrubs to help them establish new roots.
ON THE LOOKOUT
• Houseplants for scale insects (including mealybugs), whiteflies, and spider mites. Apply a labeled insecticide according to directions. Take plant into garage on a warm day to do the spraying.
• Scale insects on fruit and shade trees, landscape shrubs. Apply dormant (horticultural) oil spray according to label directions.
• It’s time to have your soil tested so you’ll be ready for early spring feedings. I’d recommend the Texas A&M Soil Testing laboratory – the same that many farmers and commercial growers use.