Gardening This Weekend: April 3, 2025
As the weather warms, we’re going to catch up quickly with our normal spring schedules. Here’s your list of things to accomplish over the next several days.
PLANT
• Trees, shrubs, groundcovers while nurseries have their best supplies. Shop at member nurseries of the Texas Nursery and Landscape Association. That’s going to put you with a local independent retail garden center that knows your plants, your soils, and your climate. Look for help from a Texas Certified Nursery Professional.
• Warm-season annual color. Let your local independent garden center personnel guide you as to the best choices. However, don’t be in too big a rush to plant summer color like caladiums and vinca. They need heat. Unless you’re in deep South Texas, wait several weeks for them.
• Warm-season vegetables: tomatoes (small to mid-sized varieties only), bush beans, squash, cucumbers, corn, peppers. In South Texas: okra, sweet potatoes.
• Sod of warm-season grasses St. Augustine, bermuda, and zoysia. Buy Texas-grown sod.
PRUNE
• Dead or damaged branches whether killed by winter’s cold or spring windstorms. Be especially careful near branches cracked and weakened by wind. They can be very heavy. It may be work that’s better left for a certified arborist.
• Spring-blooming shrubs, vines to reshape as soon as they’ve finished flowering.
• Mow lawn frequently and at recommended height to keep weeds from setting seeds.
FERTILIZE
• Newly planted trees, shrubs, and even annuals and perennials with liquid root stimulator every few weeks all season long.
• Container plants with diluted, water-soluble, high-nitrogen food every few times that you water them.
• Lawngrasses and almost all types of plants that you’re growing in your landscape and garden with high-quality, all-N fertilizer with 30 to 40 percent of its nitrogen in slow-release form. Soil tests almost always show that Texas’ clay soils have accumulated excessive amounts of phosphorus.
ON THE LOOKOUT
• Clover, thistles, dandelions, chickweed and other rampant broadleafed (non-grassy) weeds: spray with a 2,4-D based broadleafed weedkiller. Read and follow label directions.
• Snails, slugs, and pillbugs (roly-polies) feeding on tender new growth. Control with baits or with Sevin dust. You can also sink a pie pan flush with the soil surface and pour beer into it. They will be attracted to the fermenting smell. They will tumble in and drown.
• Aphids are massed atop tender new growth of many plants now. You can wash them off with a hard stream of water, or most general-purpose organic or inorganic insecticides will control them.
• Cutworms severing stems of beans, tomatoes and other tender flower and vegetable seedlings. Dust the soil with Sevin or, as my mom taught me, put a large nail immediately beside each plant’s stem to make it impossible for them to cut the stem. Of course, it’s important that you retrieve the nails later. (Yikes!)