Rodd's Seeds of Wisdom Horticultural tips and tricks from Rodd Moesel

Thanksgiving is past, the fall color is almost gone and our attention has turned to the Christmas season.  Horticulture plays a significant role in our celebrations of this special day and the experience of the whole season.  Many decorate their evergreens and yards with lights, ribbons, bows, and other seasonal decorations.  We hang wreaths, garlands and ropes of evergreens to decorate our doors, mantels and homes.  We celebrate with poinsettias and Christmas trees in key or starring roles for our holiday celebrations.

                Christmas trees have played an important role in our celebrations for centuries as the early Europeans started the custom of bringing evergreen boughs and trees into their homes after everything outdoors had frozen and turned brown except for these evergreens.  The evergreens brought life, pleasant scents and energy into the celebration and evolved with the customs of gift giving and Santa Claus.  Today many use fake or artificial trees to simulate this excitement.  If you want the real thing,  select a tree from Oklahoma Christmas tree farms or trees shipped from Oregon, Washington, Michigan, Minnesota or Wisconsin.  With the interest in sustainability, living Christmas trees (container grown or balled and burlapped) from better nurseries are growing in popularity.  After Christmas, they can be planted outdoors and added to the landscape in your yard, at a local school or neighborhood park.  Don’t forget to keep the living tree watered while in the house so it will not get too dry and dehydrated.  The longer a live tree is in the house at warm, dry conditions the more it may stress the tree and adversely affect its success when planted outside.  On cut trees make sure that you use a good tree stand, make a fresh cut on the base of the trunk. Keep the water filled in the stand to keep the tree fresh as long as possible.  There are additives like polymer gels and preservatives you can add to extend the life of the tree and to keep the needles fresh.  On both living and cut live trees it is a good idea to mist or spritz the foliage with an atomizer or mist bottle. 

                Poinsettias were discovered in Mexico by our U.S. Ambassador, Joel Poinsett, back in the 1800’s.  He sent the first plants back to botanist friends in the U.S. and soon these beautiful bracts of brilliant red poinsettias came to be known as the Christmas flower.  Breeders have taken those early poinsettias and bred varieties that stay showy for months, are naturally short, for use on tabletops, desks and counters.  They have developed all different tones of red, white, pink and marbled bracts to add excitement to our Christmas holiday festivities.  Poinsettias like to be warm and watered anytime the soil starts to feel dry.  Enjoy the beauty and excitement of this Holy Christmas season.

The trees have been showcasing a spectacular and ever changing chorus of fall colors the last few weeks as we make the annual march of time towards winter. Frankly the fall colors have been much more colorful than expected after the kind of drought we have endured this summer. The yellow colors have been especially bright and impressive this year with poplars, pecans and walnuts among those dressed in bright yellow right now. The maples were impressive in red and bronze tones but are almost done. The ornamental pears are the trees closing out the fall foliage show in reds and bronzes. Soon the yellows, reds and bronzes will all be gone and we will be left with lots of leaves, rich in nutrients, on the ground and the brown tannin filled leaves on the oaks and the few other trees that cling to their leaves into winter.

This fall color is like a big message board encouraging all of us to plant more trees and shrubs. This is a great time to plant container grown or balled and burlapped field grown trees. Add new trees and shrubs to your yard or take advantage of this fall planting season to replace trees or shrubs lost in the recent ice storms, hard freeze of last winter or the recent summer drought. Visit with your nurseryman to select the right tree for your location. You can select for size, summer color, fruit, fall color, bark, speed of growth, soil type or many other factors.

This is also the planting time for pansies and spring flowering bulbs. The pansies will provide a great show of color and hope all through the winter. They will eventually “wear out” as the heat intensifies late next spring. The spring bulb crops should be selected, purchased and planted now. We won’t see them at all through the winter as they hide under ground. During the winter they will be growing roots and the new leaves and their spring flowers will be getting positioned to spring from the ground at the start of next growing season as the days get longer and the temperatures warm up.

The crocus and the grape hyacinth are usually the first to raise their flowers from the ground as if to announce that spring is getting close. They will be followed by the narcissus or daffodils as they trumpet the actual arrival of spring with their yellow, orange or white flowers waving in the wind. The daffodils are followed by the sweet scent of hyacinths and the majestic floral displays of the tulips. It is hard to believe that so much beauty and color can come so quickly from those bulbs you plant this fall, but it does. You are not able to enjoy the spring flowering bulbs next spring unless you think ahead and plant them now. There are also many varieties of lesser known bulbs that you may want to try as well. Many of the bulbs, like most varieties of hyacinths and tulips need to be replanted each year as most won’t come back in future years and if they do, their flowers are not as impressive in those future years. The daffodils are the exception, and a great choice for Oklahoma, as they will often naturalize and come back in impressive fashion year after year.

Enjoy the chorus of tree colors this fall, the uplifting charm of pansies this winter and plant spring flowering bulbs for a symphony of early spring color.

This is a great time to select and plant your pansies, spring flowering bulbs and new trees and shrubs. “Fall is for Planting” was a major promotion of the American nursery industry for many years back in the days of my youth. They haven’t promoted that phrase for a couple of decades but it still applies. We have had such significant tree and shrub damage from the drought this summer that you may want to replace trees or shrubs you know are dead or add new trees and shrubs to your landscape. As long as you water them periodically this winter they will begin to grow roots and will start to adapt to their new environment. Fall planted trees and shrubs get a head start on spring plantings and are usually better prepared to handle their first hot summer.

Fall color is great garden art and leads to many questions. Temperature, soil moisture, sunlight and day length all influence the intensity and quality of the fall tree color. Night length is the biggest factor in this amazing process. Plants use the chlorophyll, which appears as green in the leaves to manufacture carbohydrates which are stored each growing season in the tree branches, buds and roots to support the next year’s growth. As the days get shorter and the nights longer the cells at the base of the leaf where it meets the stem or branch divide rapidly but do not expand. This makes an abscission layer of corky cells that begin to block carbohydrates going from the leaf to the branch and new minerals from the roots going to the leaf.

Fall color occurs at the same time each year since it is based on day length regardless of whether we are warm or cold. During the growing season chlorophyll is constantly being replaced as the sun breaks it down. As the flow of minerals from the roots is stopped, the leaves cannot make new chlorophyll and this process is slowed down and then stops. As the chlorophyll disappears we begin to see the other colors that have been in the leaves all the time but were covered up by the green chlorophyll including the yellow pigments of xanthophylls and the orange pigments which are carotenoids.

The red and purple pigments are anthocyanins and are manufactured each fall from the sugars that are trapped in the leaf as the process of abscission progresses. As the abscission cells become more dry and corky the leaf/stem connection cells are weakened and the leaves will drop from the tree. Some trees will hang onto their old leaves all winter but the other pigments like chlorophyll will fade out in the sunlight or when the leaf cells freeze and die. The only pigments left in the end will be the brown of the tannins.

Please spend some time outside to enjoy the beautiful and ever changing symphony of fall colors and consider doing your part of “Fall is for Planting” to add more trees and shrubs to your yard.

The seasons are changing. The leaves are changing color and many tree leaves are already dropping back to earth to turn into mulch or compost for their next life. This is the season in the plant world where we get to witness important transitions in the cycle of life. Most of the annuals will wrap up their short but colorful lives with the first hard freeze. Some tender annuals are frozen into compost by the time we drop to 32°. Tougher annuals may survive to 28° or even the mid teens but few annuals make it through a whole Oklahoma winter. Some will seed back on their own next spring from seeds left by this year’s crop, but most annuals will not survive on their rootstock and will need to be replanted next spring.

The perennials will generally freeze back to the ground but their roots will usually survive and they will hibernate over the winter ready to burst out with new growth next spring. Deciduous trees and shrubs will sacrifice their foliage to the winter freezes but their trunks or stems and branches will usually survive as they hibernate for the winter and then leaf out anew next spring. Most all of our lawn grasses are perennials and will die back for the winter as their foliage freezes back to the ground. The grasses will green up again next spring as they greet a new growing season.

Even as most of our garden plants of this season die or hibernate until spring there are still many things we can do in the garden. This is a great time to select and plant your spring flowering bulbs. I love tulips, daffodils or narcissus, Dutch Iris, hyacinths, crocus and the many other bulb crops that planted now, will be the first garden color to welcome us to next spring. As your pretty summer annuals freeze out this is a great time to replace them with pansies and viola to produce color and excitement in your yard all winter long. Hardy mums have been flowering late this year from the heat delay caused by the intense summer heat but they will usually stay colorful until we get a hard freeze.

We have lost a great many trees and shrubs this summer from our extreme drought and searing heat after the hard winter last year. This is a good time to remove trees and shrubs you know are dead and to begin planting replacements. There is a great supply of container grown and balled and burlapped trees available at your local nursery and garden center and fall is a great time to plant new trees and shrubs. Make sure to keep them watered this winter as the roots will begin to grow and help the plants to get established before leafing out next spring.

Enjoy the fall colors on the trees in your yard and neighborhood and consider planting new trees and shrubs to add more fall colors and summer cooling to your yard in the future.

The fall in Oklahoma is a special season to spend time in your yard and garden.

Many of the annuals and perennials have been rejuvenated by the cooler weather and shorter days as long as you have been watering them to quench their thirst in this continuing drought. Many of these plants are showing new spunk and energy as they literally sprint to the finish line of this growing season. The first real freeze in the Oklahoma City area is usually in early November but is always a moving target depending on the weather. The northwest part of the state shuts down the growing season first as they usually get the first hard freeze and it often is up to 2 weeks later before south central Oklahoma freezes as the cold temperatures march across our state from north to south. Hopefully we will still enjoy some nice fall colors, but many of our trees and shrubs have already thinned out their foliage and dropped many leaves prematurely as they battled the stress of last summer’s persistent heat and drought. This is likely to lessen the impact of our usual fall “garden foliage art show” as nature winds down for winter.

There are many projects to tackle in the fall yard. Plant hardy mums for fall color, decorate with pumpkins, gourds, straw bales and corn stalks. Sow or overseed tall fescue grass seed for a green lawn this winter in your sunny areas or to establish a shady lawn. Select and plant spring flowering bulbs that will get established and grow underground all winter ready to create the first bright colors of next growing season as they trumpet the arrival of spring. The most widely know spring flowering bulbs are tulips, crocus, hyacinth, narcissus or daffodils, but there are many varieties of lesser known bulbs that are also fun to plant. I have fond memories of throwing crocus bulbs across the lawn and planting them where they land to create a fun patchwork of crocus flowers in the lawn next year before the lawn even greens up. Narcissus or daffodils naturalize well here and will often come back year after year where tulips are usually only a 1 or 2 year show with the flowers getting smaller in future years, if they do carry over.

The warm season plants are getting ready to call it a season with the annuals headed to plant heaven and the perennials about ready to hibernate or “go underground” for the season. There are a few cool-weather crops that will shine and do their best work in the coming months. Flowering kale and cabbage will provide lots of color and interest through early frosts before a hard freeze finally gets them. Pansies will not only survive the frosts, but even most hard freezes to flower all through the winter as they add color and excitement to sunny areas through the short, dark, cold days of winter. Now is a great time to select and plant your pansies. Once you experience their spunky winter spirit you’ll be hooked to plant them again next fall.