Gardening This Weekend – January 30, 2025
Some things in gardening must be done within a very precise window. When that window slams shut, you’ll be left on the outside. I’m going to confine today’s listings to precisely those tasks.
PLANT
• Onions and English peas. For almost all of Texas, time is up. Wait any longer and hot weather will get you before harvest. You can wait a week or two more in the Panhandle.
• Quick color to replace anything hurt by cold spells the past couple of weeks. Last call for pansies and violas, snaps, ornamental cabbage and kale. Cyclamen, stocks, larkspurs, sweet alyssum, and wallflowers can be planted now in South Texas.
• Dormant-season transplanting must be finished very soon.
• Bare-rooted fruit trees, grapes, and blackberries.
• Bare-rooted rose bushes. If rose rosette virus is in the neighborhood, space plants to allow good air circulation.
PRUNE
• Oak trees if needed. Home gardeners doing their own pruning are advised by plant pathologists to complete that work by mid-February since oak wilt can become more active at that time. However, certified arborists will always have the best knowledge for your precise locale and it may vary somewhat from region to region. It’s always wise to have professionals involved in any pruning of oaks. All cuts made in the spring should be sealed with pruning paint or latex house paint.
• Peach and plum trees to maintain bowl-shaped, spreading habit.
• Vertical shoots from apple trees.
• Grape vines to remove 80 to 85 percent of cane growth as you maintain the plants along their trellis wire supports.
• Summer-flowering shrubs and vines lightly. Heavier pruning reduces flower production as plants become excessively vegetative.
• Remember never to “top” crape myrtles for any reason. It ruins the plants.
• Evergreen shrubs as needed to reduce height and spread. Try not to do this on an annual basis. It weakens the plants. It’s better simply to replace them with smaller species. Use lopping shears so you can tailor the plants’ final growth forms. Avoid formal shearing.
FERTILIZE
• Ryegrass and fescue with high-quality, all-nitrogen lawn fertilizer with 30 to 40 percent of the nitrogen in slow-release form. Apply it at half the recommended rate just to give the cool-season grass a boost for new growth.
• All your winter color annuals with water-soluble or liquid, high-nitrogen plant food to stimulate a new burst of growth and blooms.
• Asparagus with ammonium sulfate (21-0-0) to promote new spear production.
• Newly transplanted balled-and-burlapped and bare-rooted trees and shrubs with a liquid, high-phosphate root-stimulator fertilizer at the time of planting and monthly thereafter.
ON THE LOOKOUT
• Broadleafed (non-grassy) weeds with a weedkiller spray containing 2,4-D and possibly a couple of other broadleafed herbicides. Read and follow label directions carefully, but spray before these weeds start to bloom and set seed.
• Horticultural (dormant) oil spray to reduce populations of pecan phylloxera galls and all types of scale insects on hollies, camellias, euonymus, oaks, and fruit trees, among others.