Gardening This Weekend: January 1, 2026
In the hopes that you’ll have a little time to spend tending your flocks of flowers and foliage, here are the tasks I’d put at the top of the list.
PLANT
• Fruit trees, grapes, and blackberry plants of varieties recommended by Texas A&M horticulturists for your county or region. You will find them at specialty online nurseries and at local independent retail garden centers, but rarely at the national “big box” retailers.
• Tulip, Dutch hyacinth, and any other bulbs you’ve been “pre-chilling” in the fridge for the past couple of months. Plant immediately into well-prepared garden soil. Massed plantings usually show best.
PRUNE
• Remember that crape myrtles should never be “topped!” It’s the fastest possible way to ruin their natural growth forms. It does not hasten or improve their blooms, and it will not cause them to stay shorter. Fact is, plants that have been whacked will quickly grow back to their genetically pre-destined size, but they’ll be forever gnarly and ugly because of it.
• Overgrown shrubs can be pruned now. You can trim them back by 30 to 40 percent but do so with lopping shears (not hedge trimmers) to tailor their final appearance.
• Grapes, peaches and plums to direct their growth and improve the quality of their fruit. Techniques are quite specific. Extension publications, online resources, and better gardening reference books will show you how.
FERTILIZE
• High-phosphate, liquid root-stimulator fertilizer at time of planting bare-rooted and balled-and-burlapped fruit trees and landscape trees and shrubs and monthly for their first year after planting.
• Houseplants monthly with diluted, water-soluble fertilizer. Feeding any more often will promote lanky, unattractive growth from the light-deprived plants.
ON THE LOOKOUT
• Get mistletoe out of trees. The best technique is to clip it out by removing small twigs with the mistletoe still attached. By the time the clump has grown to be fully developed the branch is usually too large to remove. There are no herbicides that will kill the parasitic plant without harming the host trees.
• Weakened tree branches and even 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. This is especially critical for trees that have been damaged by recent winters. Should one of them fall it could inflict serious damage.