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

The spring season must be getting closer after the wacky weather of last weekend. We had gorgeous spring time weather late last week culminating with a beautiful Saturday, torrential rains and tornado warnings on Sunday night and winter snow on Monday. We wonder why it is a little more challenging to garden in Oklahoma and then we get a classic wacky mix of weather that reminds us why it is so great to be a human where you can go inside and not have to stay outside immersed in the full weather experience our plants have to survive. Your plants don’t have the luxury of selecting their environment. They get to deal with the environment and conditions where you plant them so that is why it is important for you select the right plants for the various conditions in your yard to improve the chances of gardening success. Spend a little extra time reading the labels, visiting with the staff at your local nursery or garden center or reading local or regional information in books or on the internet. Use these resources to select sun loving plants for sunny areas,  shade loving plants for shady areas, moisture loving plants for damp or poorly drained areas, tall plants for the back of beds or the center of round beds and short plants for borders.

The baseball season is just starting and the team manager has to select the player with the right skills to be the pitcher, the catcher, the shortstop and the other six positions. He also has to decide the batting order and make other decisions that often decide the success of the team. Think of yourself as your garden team manager. The more time and attention you invest into planning and selecting the right plant material the more likely you are to enjoy success in your garden. The key plant performance issues to consider include light, soil type, drainage and soil acidity or PH. Study the amount of light – full sun, full shade or the type of partial sun where you want to plant. Your soil type is important. Study whether you have a tight clay soil or loose, sandy soil or a good loam type soil.  Is the soil well drained or does water stand for a while after rains? Have you had a soil test and is the soil acidic or is it one of our more common alkaline soils? After you consider the plant survival and productivity conditions consider what size of plant you want to grow. Do you need a tree, a shrub, a vine or groundcover? Do you want annuals that generally produce more flowers and color or perennials that take less attention and come back year after year but generally only produce flowers or color for a few weeks of each year? What color foliage or flowers do you want to create the design you are envisioning? We need to wait another 4 to 6 weeks to plant most of our spring color plants but you can use this time to prepare your flowerbeds and to study and plan what you want to plant where.

This is the season for applying the pre-emergent weed killers to your lawn to kill crabgrass and summer weeds before they germinate. Now is the time to plant potatoes, onions and the rest of your cool season vegetables like lettuce, broccoli, cabbage and radishes. If you want to pick your own strawberries, rhubarb, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries or any other berries, now is a great time to plant them. Fertilize your trees and shrubs and finish pruning all your woody plant material except for spring flowering shrubs.

Let’s hope for more beautiful spring weather and then use those pretty days to get outside and soak up some sun working in your garden.

Our State was blessed with a really nice soaking rain this last weekend that should help most all plant material from the farmer’s winter wheat to the dormant trees and shrubs in your yard.  Many areas were dangerously dry before this cold but thirst quenching rain.  Our days are getting noticeably longer and you can feel the warmth of the sun getting more intense on those cherished sunny days.  The sunny days, that feel like spring, actually get us excited about the chance to get outside and have fun and help make pretty things happen in our yard and garden.

There are many timely projects to tackle in your yard and garden during this lead up to spring.  For your lawn this is the best time of year to apply a good pre-emergent herbicide or “weed and feed “  type product to control your crabgrass and broadleaf weeds before they germinate.  Use a good product containing Barricade or Dimension and think of it as birth control for your crabgrass and weeds.  Barricade is my favorite, but it must be applied and watered in before the crabgrass or weeds  germinate or  sprout.  Dimension is the rare pre-emergent that also works as a post emergent on young crabgrass and so it is a good choice if you haven’t gotten a pre-emergent applied before you start to see crabgrass sprouting in a few weeks.  There are also five or six other good pre-emergents based on older technology that must be applied before the crabgrass or weed seeds germinate.  Some work better on broadleaf weeds and some on crabgrass so visit with your local nurseryman to pick the right product for your yard and the grass or weed challenges your lawn is facing.

This is the time to finish pruning on your shade trees, hedges, and summer flowering shrubs.  With all the ice storm damage to our trees this year there is a much greater sense of urgency to prune up the damaged branches and to prune our trees  for shape and balance to deal with how the ice has wounded our trees.  This is also the most important time of the year to feed our trees and shrubs with a good, well  balanced, fertilizer.  The roots are already growing and this feeding will help nourish the roots and maximize the natural spring burst of growth when our trees and shrubs leaf out for spring.  A good spring feeding for our trees and shrubs is more important than ever this spring as they try to respond and recover from their ice wounds.

Vegetable gardeners are in full gear starting their tomato, pepper and eggplant seeds inside so they will have transplants ready to plant outside in April.  You can plant many cool season crops outside right now including potatoes, onion sets, and plants of onions, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, head lettuce, and brussel sprouts. You may plant seeds of carrots, beets, radishes, peas, spinach, mustard, turnips, swiss chard and kohlrabi now.  We still have a risk of freezing for another seven to eight weeks but these cool season crops can handle some freezing and actually like the cool weather and will produce until our hot summer weather wears them down. 

This is also a good time to plant strawberries, rhubarb, asparagus, blackberries and most of the other berry crops.  Watch for the pretty spring days and make some time to get outside and commune with nature in your yard as you have fun gardening.

One week from today is the important Valentine’s Holiday when we celebrate romantic love. For all of us who get busy with our daily lives and don’t make the time to say I love you as often as we should to our wives, husbands or significant others this is an important date on the calendar to express those special feelings and to let them know how important they are to us. Throughout history, flowers have been one of the very best ways to say I love you. The beauty and wonder of cut roses, a spring bouquet or a European arrangement convey the international message of growing love and unmatched natural beauty. When combined with a special card with your own personal message of love few things work as   well as fresh, lovely, beautiful and inspiring flowers to convey your love. There are hundreds of choices of types of cut flowers or potted plants you can share with your loved one depending on their personal tastes. I was impressed with the buddy a few years ago who shared a dozen gorgeous long stem cut roses and a gift certificate for a live potted rose of the same color his wife could add to the garden later in the spring. He started this on their 10^th anniversary and by the 25^th anniversary they had developed a very personal and special rose garden of “Valentine’s Day” roses. Select the cut flowers or live plant most special to your loved one and gift it next week with a loving message and a quiet home cooked meal or a special night out at a restaurant and start making your own special valentine memories.

The beautiful spring weather like last weekend teases us into dreaming of the spring ahead. There are many things to start doing out in the yard including testing your soil and preparing new flowerbeds. You can start applying pre-emergent herbicide “weed and feed” products to your lawn to control crabgrass and broad leaf weeds before they germinate. Apply these in February or March for best results and the very best time to apply pre-emergent herbicides is when the yellow forsythia are in bloom. Now is the time to finish pruning shade trees, hedges and summer flowering shrubs. February is a great time to fertilize shade trees, fruit and nut trees and shrubs now before they start to leaf out for spring. Now is the time to spray dormant oil on fruit and shade trees for control of mites, galls and other assorted overwintering insects.

Valentine’s Day to mid March is the best planting season for cool season vegetables like onions, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, swiss chard, lettuce, peas, spinach, and turnips. It is also a good time to plant strawberry plants and asparagus crowns. 

Enjoy Valentine’s Day with your special love and start getting outside on the nice days to get a taste of spring.

January is one of the months when we spend the least time outside in the garden or landscape because of short days and the generally inhospitable weather. Even in January you can use the nice days to finish cleaning up the ice storm damage and pruning your trees and shrubs.  This is a great time to plan your landscape and decide on new trees and shrubs you want to plant this spring. You can study seed catalogs, visit your local nursery or garden center  or browse gardening information on the internet to select the nursery stock,  vegetables, annuals and perennials you want to plant this spring and where you want to plant them. You could also attend the Home, Landscape and Garden show at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds this Friday, Saturday and Sunday and enjoy several magnificent landscapes built for your enjoyment and to provide garden ideas.  The show will feature several nurseries, garden centers and landscapers exhibiting between the storm windows, doors,  storm cellars, lawn chairs and other home and garden products and speakers. Several local and state gardening groups and schools will be at the show so you can learn about their programs. The Oklahoma Horticulture Society, a volunteer group of state wide garden and plant lovers that offers a great newsletter, regular speakers and tours will be at the show so you can join and start participating with these fun and interesting gardeners to enjoy Oklahoma  focused programming.

I get many questions about what I think about organics, sustainability and green gardening. I view virtually all work you do in the yard and garden as for the greater environmental good as long as you are planting and maintaining live plants and not plastic or artificial shrubs and flowers. All living plant material absorbs, in fact, needs carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses to conduct photosynthesis just to maintain itself and more importantly to grow. Plants are the most effective way to absorb and sequester carbon back into the ground. In general, the bigger the plant canopy the more clean oxygen the plant gives off for humans and the more carbon dioxide and gasses it absorbs, uses and sequesters.  The answer to many environmental challenges is to plant more trees, shrubs, turf and plants.

Organic gardening has been a big issue for decades but has been a popular trend for many year since the publication of Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring” published in 1962. The organic movement goes through periods of increasing attention and support, particularly after some type of food safety scare whether with beef, lettuce or other foods. I certainly respect and have no problem with those who want to raise their own or buy organic produce and food crops  but I feel completely safe eating non organic produce and food as long as the produce is well washed and I feel comfortable with the grower, store or restaurant where I get the food. I do feel more comfortable with food that is grown in the United States as that gives me more confidence in the production methods and the quality and integrity of the food safety standards and inspections.    You should be prepared to pay more for true organically grown produce at your local farmers market or grocery store as it costs more per pound to grow most crops organically. The nitrogen fertilizer is much harder to deliver to plants without using commercial or chemical fertilizers and usually results in lower yields in organic systems. As the weather gets hotter in the summer the bug pressure increases substantially and it gets harder to maintain organic yields without losing more vegetables or fruits to pests and diseases. The physical appearance of organic fruits and vegetables often suffers as we move into the summer months in large part because of this increased pest and disease pressure. These days most commercial vegetable and fruit growers are very careful not to over fertilize because of the high cost of fertilizers and their own concern for the environment they need to protect if they want to continue as a viable growing operation. These costs and all this attention and discussion have dramatically reduced over feeding which can effect water quality and future crop yields.

When I was a boy growing up, commercial growers had access to much harsher chemicals and often applied them on a weekly or regular schedule to both control known pest and disease problems and as a preventative or barrier to future problems. As environmental awareness has grown, as growers have had to deal with rapidly increasing costs of chemicals and a much more limited arsenal of chemicals and since the physical act of spraying is just about the least favorite activity for every  grower, especially young growers, most growers now actively practice IPM or integrated pest management. Most grower only spray now when yellow sticky cards or other trapping techniques indicate that a problem has reached a certain level and then they spray for that problem and usually use a targeted chemical. Most growers have reduced their chemical use by 50 to 80% over the last decade. It will be very hard to feed our growing world population without the use of chemical fertilizers, fungicides and insecticides especially with agriculture now expanding into energy production for ethanol and other fuels. This will create increasing pressure for crop lands and higher yields to give us both food and energy.  

You can certainly grow your own organic food if you will take the time and effort or support your local growers who make that commitment of time and resources to grow organic food for you if you choose to go that way because of allergies or for your personal peace of mind. I will continue to eat food grown both organically and with chemical fertilizers and pesticides but I am especially anxious to support our local production as much as possible. If you haven’t grown any of your own vegetables or fruit trees for a few years, think about growing a few of your own tomatoes, peppers, squash or melons this year. Few things surpass the joy of growing your own food, watching it ripen, picking it when vine ripe, washing the harvest and eating tasty, crisp, fresh food.

Happy New Year! We hope you had a very happy and rewarding 2007 and are full of excitement and anticipation as we enter this fresh year of 2008 which affords us a new clean start. Every year results in special memories and experiences that accumulate to tell the stories of our lives. Although we get a fresh start each year we hopefully are wise enough to learn from our experiences in the earlier preceding years to do a better job each new year in picking out how to spend our time, what skills to develop, whom we want to spend our time with and the myriad of other choices and decisions we get to make each day. A new year gives us a great opportunity to re-evaluate whether we are happy and growing in our jobs, our families, church, community, friendships, education and hobbies. The older I get the more I have come to realize that if something is not working in family, church, work or personal relationships it may involve my attitude or carrying too much baggage or memory instead of exercising forgiveness and giving things a fresh start. The New Year seems a good time to re-evaluate, to forgive and to start fresh but blessed with the knowledge and experiences of past successes and short-comings.

Our yards and gardens can use a fresh start or a review every now and then as well and a new year provides a good opportunity to do just that.  If your trees and shrubs got slammed by the ice storm that may have created issues that force you to do some planning and of course the first thing you have to do is prune out the damaged branches or cut down trees or shrubs damaged beyond recovery. After dealing with the emergency issues, take some time to decide if you want to spend more or less time outdoors in the year ahead. Do you want to grow any of your own food? Do you want to add new trees or shrubs to your permanent landscape? Do you like the amount of flowerbeds you have now or do you want to add new beds around the trees in the front yard or new flowerbeds along the front sidewalk? Do you want to remake your backyard into an outdoor living area? Do you want to add a garden pond, a cold frame or a greenhouse? Do you want to add stone walks or create a butterfly or wildlife garden?

There are an endless array of possibilities to change or upgrade your personal outdoor living and landscape environment. If you want to spend more time outside getting a physical workout, taking in some sunshine, and communing with nature you can easily tackle most all these projects yourself and may only want to hire a landscaper or gardener for heavier projects like laying stone pathways or digging garden ponds. If you don’t want to tackle the actual physical work but still want to enjoy the beauty and serenity of an upgraded landscape you can hire the landscape design and installation services from a local nursery or garden center to make these dreams and visions a reality. Many people enjoy the experience of planting their own color annuals or vegetables, mowing their lawn and basic yard maintenance but if you prefer to spend all your outdoor time with a glass of iced tea in a swinging chair or on a patio recliner you can hire really good yard services to mow and trim your yard and even plant your seasonal color plants.                

Take time to decide how you want your yard to look and how much of the work you want to do and how much you want do with your children, the help of neighborhood youth or you can hire commercial landscapers, garden centers or lawn services to help you plan, create and maintain the yard and gardens you have dreamed about. Whether you are going to do the work yourself or have someone to do the work for you this is good time of year to do a soil test. Dig down to about 6” deep at several places in your flowerbeds or lawn and then use samples from 3 or 4 similar areas to fill a pint bottle with soil. Take the bottle to your nearest OSU county extension office and they will run a good soil test for $10.00 and get the results completed in about 2 to 3 weeks. Since the cost of fertilizer has shot way up the last couple of years and with all of us working to be more responsible with the environment soil tests make more sense now than ever. In this region we usually do not need any additional phosphorous and may not even need any potassium. You may only need to feed nitrogen to your lawn and possibly even your gardens. There is no sense to pay for more fertilizer than you need and the extra phosphorous can negatively affect our water quality and encourage more algae bloom in streams and lakes. I would encourage you to do a soil test in your front yard and another from your backyard and maybe a third from your main flowerbed. When you get your results take them to your local nursery or garden center to help you select the best fertilizer program for your yard without wasting valuable minerals and resources. You will probably save enough on your fertilizer to pay for the soil tests plus you will be more environmentally responsible to only feed what is needed this spring and summer. 

All the mail order seed and garden catalogs are now mailing out so this winter season is a great time to review these catalogs and pick out new plants you want to try. I like to encourage you to buy locally and our local nurseries offer many new plants but occasionally there will be specialty or unusual plants that are only available by mail order or over the internet.  Do try something new as it can be fun and lets you feel like a plant explorer and gives you something to show friends and talk about. Have fun planning your garden and make time to enjoy your yard and gardens as part of a very special 2008.