Gardening This Weekend: December 4, 2025
Here are the gardening tasks I’d rate at the top of the list for this first weekend of December.
PLANT
• Pansies, pinks, ornamental cabbage and kale, snapdragons, and other winter color to spruce up your beds and patio pots. Your local independent retail nursery professional will know the best types for your part of Texas.
• Daffodils, narcissus, and jonquils, as well as summer snowflakes and grape hyacinths now. Wait two more weeks to plant tulips and Dutch hyacinths that you’ve had “pre-chilling” for 45 days at 45F in the fridge to give them an artificial winter.
• Dig and transplant trees and shrubs once they have been exposed to at least one hard freeze and are totally dormant for winter.
PRUNE
• Remove all winter-killed stubble from perennials, annuals, bananas and vegetable plantings. Grind it and use it in the compost.
• Mow lawn one more time to remove last of the fallen leaves. Mowing also eliminates many rank-growing weeds.
• Damaged and dead branches from trees, especially if they might break and fall in wind or ice storms. They can be very heavy, capable of causing injury and great damage.
FERTILIZE
• Winter annual color with complete-and-balanced, water-soluble plant food with each watering during the winter. Keep them growing actively.
• Poinsettias, Christmas cacti, and other flowering container plants will not need fertilizer between now and spring. Just keep them moist at all times.
• Similarly, go light on feeding of houseplants in dark indoor conditions of winter. Resume heavier feedings come springtime.
ON THE LOOKOUT
• Have frost cloth bought and pre-cut to cover tender winter color and sensitive woody plants should extreme cold blow through. You want it to snugged down against the leaves and flowers so that you can weight it against the ground on all sides of the bed to make it airtight. Do not use plastic as it traps heat on sunny mornings.
• Houseplants for signs of population explosions of scale, mealy bugs and white flies. These pests have no natural predators when we move our plants indoors.
• Keep natural Christmas trees in a base filled with water. (No nutrients or other odd concoctions that could spill and stain flooring.)