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

Most of this year is now history including the 2012 growing season for most crops.  Most Okies are now starting to focus on Christmas and the end of this year.  We can still plant container grown or balled and burlapped trees, shrubs, spring flowering bulbs and pansies.  Most of our horticultural attention in this happy and joyful season is focused on Christmas trees, Christmas greens and poinsettias as we decorate and establish or carry on family traditions.

Christmas trees and Christmas greens have been used in many northern cultures for centuries as part of winter festivals long before they became important parts of our Christian Christmas celebrations.  In many cold northern cultures they reached a point of mid winter where they had survived many weeks or months of hard freezes, snow and ice and were tired of being shut up in their homes or shelters.  It became important to cut branches or even whole bushes or trees of evergreens like pines, hollies or junipers to bring color, life and pleasant fresh scents into the winter home.  Over time, Christians adopted these symbols and activities as part of our holiday experiences and tradition.  Although many have resorted to artificial trees or greens it is hard to match the experience of going to the woods, if you own your own woods, or visiting a Christmas tree farm and selecting and cutting your own fresh Christmas tree.  The family experience of doing this together can be a lifelong family memory.  We have at least 5 nice Christmas tree farms in the metro area where you can cut or dig your own Christmas tree and many others around the state.  If you don’t have time to do the whole Christmas tree farm experience you can visit your local nursery or garden center to select a pre-dug living Christmas tree.  Many nurseries also offer fresh cut trees or locate other Christmas tree lots in your neighborhood.  If you select a cut Christmas tree, you should make a fresh cut of the base stem as you put the tree in your Christmas tree stand, fill the stand with fresh water and you can add a Christmas tree preservative or polymer to help keep the cut tree hydrated.  Make sure to check and refill the water every few days or as needed.

For living Christmas trees you hope to plant out in the yard after Christmas, you may want to shorten your tree season to 7 to 14 days to make sure not to dry the tree out too much or get it “too soft” in the warmer indoor temperatures.  Make sure to keep the live tree watered.  Both the cut and live trees will benefit from an occasional misting or spritzing of the tree and even from some additional pans of water under the trees to evaporate around the tree and to keep up the humidity or moisture around the tree.

There is something special about fresh greens of needle or broadleaf evergreens used to decorate doors, mantels, doorways or tabletops when used as a rope, swag, wreaths or just loose boughs!  Fresh evergreen trimmings cut from your own yard or purchased at the local nursery adds life, color and energy to your Christmas home.  Few ways are better to say Merry Christmas than Christmas trees, fresh greens and poinsettias.  We have an extra week of time between an early Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, let plants help you celebrate the holidays.

There have been big changes in the last 2 weeks in Oklahoma gardens as most areas of the state got their first hard freeze.  The most tender annuals have now frozen to the ground, some tougher annuals have only burned back the top most tender foliage to survive until a harder freeze. The deciduous trees and shrubs are at various stages of the fall transition from growing season to winter hibernation.  Some have already dropped all their foliage while others are in various stages of turning yellow like cottonwoods or the pretty reds of our maples.  A few trees still have active green chlorophyll and are still in various shades of green awaiting the winter kill of a harder freeze.  This is the season when evergreens become the “green” star of the garden for the next few months until spring.  Evergreens provide the green color in our landscapes through the beauty of needled evergreens like junipers, pines, cedars and broadleaf evergreens like hollies, euonymus, boxwood, and many others.  These evergreens even play important roles in our winter festivals and holidays when used as wreaths and Christmas trees.

This is the season to plant your spring flowering bulbs if you want to start spring 2013 off with a burst of early spring color.  Daffodils or narcissus naturalize here in most soils and come back year after year to produce their unique yellow, white or orange flowers that “trumpet” the arrival of spring.  The enchanting beauty of tulips drove the early European royalty into the first investment bubble.  They produce an unparalleled royal show of red, pink, yellow and orange color.  They rarely naturalize here and need to be replanted most years.  Hyacinth, Dutch iris, crocus and many other lesser known but still beautiful and fun spring flowering bulbs should be planted now.  Buy nice firm bulbs, dig or auger a hole, drop the bulb – shoot or growing side up, cover with soil, water and prepare for a spring fireworks of flowers.  The old timers say the bigger the bulbs the bigger the show.  Your local nurseryman can give you specific instructions but we generally suggest that most bulbs should be planted about 3 times as deep as the bulb size with a little bone meal or bulb food.

There are several crops that will produce color all though the winter in your garden and the star performers in Oklahoma are pansies. There are many great varieties available in lots of colors and flower sizes so you can be charmed by colorful flowering pansy faces through all the short, darker days of winter.  Select nice healthy plants at your local garden center, plant them in a sunny flowerbed or decorative container, water regularly and enjoy the flower show all winter and through early spring.  They will fatigue and give out as the season heats up in late spring and early summer next year.

We wish you a happy Thanksgiving later this week and hope you will be blessed with time and fellowship with family and friends.  I am convinced that time in the garden helps keep us grounded and helps us appreciate the wonders of the world around us as it instills a year round tone of thankfulness in our lives.

Most of the nation is focused on tomorrow’s elections but if you want to escape the intensity and stress of the elections there are many things to be done in the fall garden.  This is a great time to replace your tender annuals with tough and colorful pansies, ornamental kale and cabbage which thrive in the cooler weather of fall and early winter.  You can grow them in container gardens or flowerbeds and they will provide perky flowers and fun colors right on through the darker and sometimes dismal weather of winter.  A pot of colorful pansies or border of cheerful pansy faces along the front sidewalk has caused me to turn many an early cold morning frown into a smile when leaving a warm house to face the shocking cold of a dark winter morning.  Transplants of pansies, kale and cabbage are readily available at your local nursery or garden center and there are hundreds of varieties offering lots of choices in colors and flower face patterns.  You can plant all one color or a nice mix to produce a smorgasboard of color.

We are now in the heart of the season to plant spring flowering bulbs like tulips, hyacinth, daffodils or narcissus, grape hyacinths, crocus, dutch iris, or allium.  Choose firm, healthy bulbs.  A good rule of thumb is that the larger the bulb, the larger or more flowers it will produce.

Most spring flowering bulbs do best in sunny areas but remember they will usually pop out of the ground and bloom before most trees leaf out in the spring.  A few of the smaller more unusual bulbs like snowdrops, trillium and anemone do best in the partial shade.  You can plant the bulbs anytime the ground is not frozen, even up into February.  The sooner you plant now, the less the bulbs will dehydrate and the sooner they will start growing roots under ground to give you a bigger show next spring.  Your nurseryman or garden center can tell you the best planting depth for the bulbs you select but generally we plant bulbs 2.5 to 3 times as deep as the height of the bulb.  A 2” tall tulip bulb would plant 5 to 6 inches deep.  Always plant with the stem side or pointed side of the bulb pointing up and the root or flatter side pointing down.  You can plant the bulbs in rows or patterns or go for a natural effect and roll or gently throw them across the ground and plant them where they land.  Bulbs make a stunning effect when planted in waves, clumps or drifts.  You should add some bone meal or super phosphate into the planting hole as you plant the bulbs to provide a good natural slow release fertilizer source to help produce a strong healthy root system on your bulb crops.

Tulips are spectacular but don’t naturalize well here so we usually have to plant new bulbs each fall to enjoy their “welcome to spring” show. Daffodils or narcissus often naturalize here and come back year after year to trumpet the arrival of spring annually with their yellow, orange or white trumpet shaped flowers.

Bulb plantings should be well watered after covering with soil to complete your planting.  Two of the most impressive things in the world are planting seeds or bulbs and then watching the miracle that unfolds as that small capsule of life produces a whole plant and a sea of spring color.

We have begun one of the greatest natural shows on earth and it happens every fall.  It is never the same from year to year but it happens very near the same time every year when the days get shorter and the nights get longer and cooler.  The big show is the symphony of fall color we get to enjoy as our deciduous trees and shrubs prepare to shed or drop their leaves for winter.  I’ve often wondered if autumn was named fall because of the falling leaves?  Some trees have already started changing colors after our early flirtation with the 32 degree freeze mark a couple of weeks ago. Many other trees are still a vibrant green and even producing new growth but all deciduous trees have started or will soon start the process of sugar storage, shutting down their seasonal food production and shedding their leaves before they freeze as part of the annual ritual of winter survival.

There are 3 main pigments that star in this annual fall color show.  They are chlorophyll, which provides the green color we see in leaves most of the year and is the workhorse of photosynthesis that uses sunlight to make sugars which are the food that fuels our plants.  Carotenoids produce the yellow, orange and some tones of brown.  They are at work in the leaf cells but are “masked” or covered up by the green chlorophyll most of the growing season.  Occasionally the carotenoids show through in bananas, daffodils, corn, carrots and others.  Anthocyanins produce the reds, oranges and blue or purple colors in red apples, grapes, cherries, strawberries, blueberries and cranberries besides the bright fall leaf colors that take our breath away.  The anthocyanins are water soluble and we get the best fall colors when we have warm days and cool but not freezing nights when the leaf is still making sugars in the fall but not removing them all from the leaf.  These excess plant sugars give us the bright colors of fall as the chlorophyll production shuts down.  Chlorophyll production slows down and then stops at slightly different times in different tree or shrub species based on day length and temperatures.  As the green chlorophyll stops production and gets used up or destroyed we can now see the yellow carotenoids that have been in the leaf all the time and the red, orange and purple tinted anthocyanins  created by the autumn production of excess sugars.  Some trees, like poplars, only show the yellow.  Other trees show the yellow carotenoids and then the red or orange anthocyanin.  Others like Bradford Pears and many maples seem to go right from green to tinges of red or purple.

Day length and cool weather are the most important triggers for fall color and are pretty much the same year after year but we get big variations in the other factors of light intensity, soil moisture and temperature that affect our deciduous trees and shrubs differently from year to year and assures that the fall color extravaganza is a new and different show each year. Fall is also a great time to plant new trees and shrubs to create shade for future summers and dazzling fall colors in future years

Happy Columbus Day! As we celebrate Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America we have entered the heart of the fall gardening season.  This continent has always been blessed with an amazing diversity of plant materials from long before Columbus.  Columbus and the explorers and settlers that followed began the great “swap shop” of plant material and genetics as they took newly discovered American trees, berries, flowers and vegetables to Europe and brought new seeds and plants from Europe, Asia and Africa to the Americas.  That exchange from around the world continues even today as we try to cultivate the best from everywhere while cherishing and saving our native plants.  Most Oklahoma gardens are a combination or melting pot of native and introduced plant material.

Most all of the state was blessed with really nice soaking rains over the last 2 weeks and it is amazing how quickly our lawns and most plant material have greened back up after those refreshing rains combined with the cooler temperatures of fall.  We have about 4 to 5 weeks of crisp fall growing season to enjoy our annual gardens before the first freeze but there are many hardier annuals, perennials and cool season fall crops that will survive the early light frosts and keep performing until we get a really hard freeze below 25 degrees, 20 degrees or even 15 degrees depending on the type of plant and the microclimate where you have them planted.

The hardy mums or fall Chrysanthemums are now in full color and most will stay really showy until the first freeze.  They do great in containers or the ground but are heavy drinkers and will need regular watering when we have warmer drying days.  The ornamental kale and cabbage will stay pretty well into winter and are now widely available at local nurseries.  Pansies provide a perky uplift of charming flowers in sunny areas throughout the whole winter, blooming even through snows and most other winter challenges with just a little watering attention if we get dry during the winter.  Few things cheer me up as much as the bright colorful pansy faces in their full palette of yellow, orange, red, bronze, blue and purple flowers on cold, dark winter days.  To experience that joy yourself buy a flat or two of pansies to plant along your sidewalks or in large decorative pots on your porch or patio.  If you want a green winter lawn you need to overseed with tall fescue in the next couple of weeks and then water well.  Don’t forget now is the prime time to buy and plant all your spring flowering  bulbs like tulips, hyacinths, crocus and daffodils to assure a great round of flowers to kick-off next spring.

Fall is one of the best times to spend time in the garden so I hope you will make time to plant flowers, bulbs and trees but also just to walk, sit and meditate in the great outdoors of your yard.