Gardening This Weekend: February 5, 2026

With nice weather back upon us, here are things you can hopefully accomplish over the next several days.

PLANT
• Replace or replant cool-season annual color that might have been damaged by the low temperatures and the weight of the sleet and ice.
• Onions and snap-type English peas in southern half of the state.
• Irish potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower, and other Cole crops along Gulf Coast and in Deep South Texas. Wait a couple of weeks for Central and North Central Texas. Wait until later in February farther north.
• Fruit trees, either bare-rooted or from containers. Buy varieties recommended for your locale by Texas AgriLife Extension Service horticulturists of Texas A&M. These fact sheets will list the best types.
• Transplant established trees and shrubs that need to be moved from one location to another. Dig with balls of earth intact around their roots. Prune back proportionate to the quantity of roots lost in the digging.

PRUNE
• Peach and plum trees to remove strongly vertical shoots and encourage spreading habit.
• Grapes to remove 80 percent or more of cane growth.
• Evergreen shrubs as needed to reshape. If you’re having to prune them repeatedly, consider replacing them with something more compact.
• Roses-of-Sharon, crape myrtles, trumpetcreepers, and other woody, summer-blooming plants as needed to shape. Never “top” a crape myrtle for any reason. It is never a good idea.
• Bush roses by 50 percent, with each cut made just above a bud facing out from the center of the plant. Learn what rose rosette virus looks like, and if you see it in your plantings, remove them immediately, root systems and all.

FERTILIZE
• Asparagus with all-nitrogen fertilizer. In this one case, ammonium sulfate (21-0-0) is good.
• Winter annuals with water-soluble, high-nitrogen fertilizer to encourage vigorous growth, blooms.
• Cool-season grasses (rye and fescue) to promote vigorous growth as soils warm back up again. Use high-nitrogen or all-nitrogen food, with half or more of that nitrogen in slow-release form.

ON THE LOOKOUT
• Broadleafed (non-grassy) weeds can be treated with appropriate broadleafed herbicide when temperatures allow. Read and follow label directions carefully. You will probably want to wait until new growth resumes.
• Horticultural (dormant) oil spray to reduce populations of scales and overwintering insects. Note: oil sprays have not given good results on crape myrtle bark scale. Treatment for that pest is a soil drench with Imidacloprid in mid-May.