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

            The “trumpeters” of the spring plant world are in full color and hitting their bright colored notes to announce the arrival of spring. With the very cold and icy weather in January and early February we were running behind schedule heading to spring but now with two weeks of gorgeous above normal temperatures and hardly dropping to freezing temperatures the tables have turned and we are now ahead of schedule as we approach spring. The spring flowering bulbs like crocus provided the first trumpets of spring and are now joined by the lovely narcissus or daffodils. The daffodils do the best job of the spring flowering bulbs of naturalizing here and coming back year after year. Few bulbs create the impact of a bed of daffodils or the artistic statement of a wandering row or scattered sprinkle of bright yellow daffodils like the fun new plantings of over 50,000 daffodils in the medians of Warr Acres along Northwest 39^th, Northwest Highway and along North McArthur. The flowering shrubs start with the yellow forsythia in lead trumpet position followed by the orange and red flowering quince and the elegant white spirea. I also get a kick out of these flowering shrubs and flowering trees that produce such bold and colorful flowers before they even produce any leaves or foliage so the flowers really trumpet spring even before the plants leaf out. These spring flowers are produced on old wood using sugars and food the plant has stored up all winter to produce these spring flowerworks, the plant world version of fireworks. The good news is that the ever changing spring flower show lasts for weeks instead of seconds. The flowering trees are led into flower by the flowering crabapples, apricot fruit trees and Bradford pears and these are soon followed by the redbuds and peach trees. I love to enjoy these early bursts of spring flowers while walking through the neighborhood or driving to appointments. Like most folks I get serious spring fever after being cooped up inside more during the dark and cold winter and really cherish the nicer spring weather, longer days, brighter sun and the early spring flowers. If you haven’t added some of the spring “trumpeter” flowers, shrubs and trees to your landscape you may want to add some now so you can enjoy this show in your own yard in the future.

            The old timers used to schedule to get their potatoes planted by that great Irish holiday of Saint Patricks Day that happens this weekend and indeed we are nearing the end of the prime planting season for potatoes, onions, cabbage, broccoli and most of the cool season vegetables. Even though we have really warmed up it is still too early to plant tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, melons and other warm season vegetables. The safe plan is to plant most of these crops in mid April or later after our last average frost date. If you choose to plant these warm season vegetables early be prepared with wax paper hot kaps, the amazing wall of water, European cloches or some type of fabric protection to put around the early plantings on cold nights to provide a little extra frost protection.

            Now is the best time to prune back your rose bushes to remove old deadwood and encourage strong new canes as they leaf out for spring. This is a good time to plant trees, shrubs, perennials and cool season annuals. You should still wait to buy and plant warm season annuals until mid April or after we get past the risk of freezing. This is a wonderful time to prepare your soil in flowerbeds and container gardens to be ready to plant after we get past those freezes.

Time is running out to apply a pre-emergent weed killer or weed and feed product to your lawn. There are many good pre-emergents to control crabgrass and summer weeds and they need to be applied before the crabgrass or weed seeds germinate in order to prevent their germination. My favorite products for this weed killing mission include those that contain Barricade, Sulfentrazone or Dimension. The only one that also has some post emergent effect is Dimension so if you wait more than another seven to ten days to apply the weed and feed product you probably should use a product with Dimension because it acts as both a pre-emergent and will kill crabgrass for the first four weeks after it has germinated. Make sure to water in any of these products after application for best results. There are some different formulations of Dimension that can even be used in your flowerbeds or around trees and shrubs to control weeds around ornamentals as long as you don’t plan to sow flower or vegetable seeds in those areas this spring. Make some time to get outside and enjoy the “trumpet” flowers announcing spring and have fun planting in your garden.

This is the best time to treat your lawn with a pre-emergent weed killer or weed and feed product to control crabgrass and other weeds in your lawn. It is easier to control crabgrass and summer weeds with a pre-emergent herbicide that keeps the seeds of these undesirable weeds from ever sprouting or germinating. The pre-emergent must be applied before the seeds germinate to achieve control.  There are many types of  pre-emergent crabgrass and weed control products including active ingredients like Treflan, Balan, Team, Simazine, Gallery, Surflan or three of the newer products are Barricade,  Dimension and Sulfentrazone.  I prefer the products with Barricade, Dimension or Sulfentrazone as they appear to offer the broadest control of crabgrass and summer weeds.  You can get any of these products in a granular form that you can spread with a fertilizer spreader across your lawn and several of these products are also available in a liquid form you can spray on the lawn.  You can get these products in an herbicide only form or packaged with a basic fertilizer to make a weed and feed type product to kill the weeds while you  fertilize your lawn. These weed and feed products are the most popular way to kick off your annual lawn care program and now is the time to get it applied for best results.

We have been blessed with some weather that really feels like spring including several beautiful near perfect days, some very windy days and even our first warnings of  spring storms  and tornadoes, I’ve seem the first crocus flowers popping from the ground and flashing their bright colors to welcome spring. With the arrival of March we have a great variety of garden projects that are now ready to tackle.  This is a great time for soil preparation for both your vegetable and flower gardens.  Work your existing or new beds to spade depth and add a 2 to 3” layer of sphagnum peat moss, fine processed bark, composted organic material or mix in last years top cover mulch of bark and cottonseed hulls to enrich the soil, lower the PH and improve the air and moisture movement in your soil.  This is a good time to take a soil test in your flowerbed and in your lawn so you can do a better job of fertilizing your garden and lawn with the proper nutrition and not wasting expensive fertilizer or over-feeding and polluting our environment.  Collect about a pint of soil collected from several spots about six inches deep and then take the sample to your country extension office for a very reasonably priced soil test.  After you have tilled or spaded your planting area, now is the time to get your vegetable garden growing by planting potatoes, onions, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, strawberries, asparagus, rhubarb and the entire spectrum of cool season vegetables.  We need to wait a few more weeks to plant tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and the other warm season crops until after the last average frost in mid April.  You can go ahead and plant grapes and other berry crops and all kinds of bareroot or container grown trees and shrubs on any of our nice spring days.

Our Sunday School lesson Sunday was very timely as it spoke about the principles of pruning grapes and while I suspect Christ was using the story to help us think about pruning or shaping our behavior in our personal lives the description is still appropriate for describing pruning to our grapes, trees and shrubs. The Bible story says we should prune out the dead wood and prune back the productive wood to encourage more branches and a bigger harvest. That is as good a description of the reason we prune as you can give. Now is the time to prune out the dead wood on your trees, evergreen shrubs, summer flowering shrubs, grapes and berries. We really like to wait to prune roses and summer flowering shrubs until the middle two weeks of March and you can prune spring flowering shrubs such as forsythia, quince and lilacs after they bloom this spring. After you prune out the dead wood you should prune back the good wood and remember that new branches will sprout from the buds just below where you prune. Select a few gardening projects and get outside and enjoy our pretty spring weather, brighter sun and longer days as you assist Mother Nature to get the new growing season off to a good start.

Hope you had a very special Valentines Day. Remember to keep your cut flowers in clean water and add some cut flower preservative or cut flower food to further extend the beauty of your roses or other cut flowers. Make sure to strip off all foliage that will be below the water line to help keep the water clean of decaying material and to extend the shelf life. Some roses will get a droop neck where the flower stems bend way over just below the flower or bud. This is usually caused by an air bubble or other blockage in the stem that is preventing water from getting up the stem to the flower. As soon as you start to see this problem, remove the flower from the vase, make a fresh cut, best if the new cut is made under water in the sink and then placed back in the vase. Sometimes the blockage will be solved and it will perk back up. Other times the droop neck gets worse and you just have to send that flower to the compost pile or dry it and save it for a prank “over the hill” bouquet.

Once we passed Valentines day we officially launched the 2007 outdoor gardening season and there are many projects we can now tackle in the yard. This is a great time to fertilize trees and shrubs including fruit trees, pecans and other nut trees. This is a good time to prune shade trees and some late summer flowering shrubs and hedges. Be careful not to prune spring flowering shrubs like quince and forsythia now but wait until just after they bloom or you will cut off your spring flowers. You can plant container grown trees and shrubs pretty much year round if the soil is not frozen but bareroot trees and shrubs need to be planted now in February or March for best results. Now is the time to spray peaches with a fungicide to prevent peach leaf curl and now is a great time to apply a well refined dormant oil to trees and shrubs to help control insects that may have over wintered like mites or aphids and to control galls.

We are a few weeks away from the best time to apply pre-emergent crabgrass and weed control for our lawns. It is best to apply that when the bright yellow forsythia come into flower. March is also the time to sow tall fescue in shady areas. If you want to do something to your lawn now you could spray glyphosate (Roundup) over your dormant Bermuda grass lawn to kill all the green winter weeds and grasses on days when the temperature is above fifty degrees. Be careful anytime you spray glyphosate because it will kill any living tissue that is green with chlorophyll including desirable shrubs or plants if you get the spray on them.

The most significant outdoor gardening activity that is ready to go is starting your spring vegetable garden. Valentines Day to Saint Patrick’s Day in mid March is the best time to plant your cool season vegetables. That means now is the time to cut your seed potatoes into two or three ounce pieces with at least one “eye” for a new shoot on each piece to grow your own baked potatoes or french fries. Most folks need about fifty feet of row of Irish potatoes per person to supply the average household.  This is the time to plant twenty-five feet of row of onion sets or onion plants to grow your own onions. This is the optimum time to sow seed in the garden for carrots, swiss chard, kohlrabi, head or leaf lettuce, peas, spinach or turnips. Most greenhouses or garden centers will have small transplants ready of cauliflower, cabbage, head or leaf lettuce that you can plant to grow your own nutritious crops. Most of these cool season crops will provide you a good harvest starting in about two months if planted now. In March we can start planting broccoli, beets and radishes and then in April and May we can plant lots of warm season vegetables. Many veteran gardeners will stage these crops with successive plantings every couple of weeks over the planting season to insure a steady supply of fresh produce for your dining pleasure. If you enjoy fresh strawberries, rhubarb, or asparagus this is a good time to purchase those plants, usually available bareroot at this time to add to your garden where they will produce for many years once established. These will be available later in the spring in pots or cans for transplanting into your yard. If you want to add fruiting vines to your garden this is a good time to buy and plant grapes, blackberries, raspberries, boysenberries or most other berries.

If you are tired of being cooped up inside through these cold winter months, want to get some good exercise and enjoy growing some of your own fresh vegetables take advantage of the nice days to get outside and start growing.

Hope you and your yard survived the recent ice storms without too much damage. Our outdoor plant material has really been tested this year with some very cold weather keeping us below freezing for an extended period of several days. The very heavy ice caused a lot of natural pruning on our trees and shrubs, some of which will require some clean up pruning in March before the new growth sprouts for a new year.

Speaking of a new year we will celebrate Valentines Day for 2007 before our next visit and one of the best, time tested ways to show love and affection is to share the beauty of cut flowers or living plants. From the days of Greek mythology we have picked pretty flowers from the hills and valleys to present to our sweethearts. As the years have progressed we started building conservatories and greenhouses to grow more impressive flowers to gift to our sweethearts and now we are able to purchase beautiful and unique flowers from all over the world to express our love. Valentines Day is the largest cut flower holiday in our country and more cut roses, carnations and spring bouquets are sold on this day than any other to express the deep love we share for our spouses and sweethearts. Roses are clearly the most popular Valentine flower and worldwide production usually sells out on this day that celebrates love. The best American and Dutch grown roses draw the highest prices for their limited supplies of long stemmed roses. Worldwide production of cut roses has grown dramatically with huge rose crops produced at favorable altitudes in countries like Ecuador and Columbia that have much lower production costs and still produce beautiful crops and now dominate the United States retail markets and have actually lowered the cost of a dozen roses in recent years on Valentines Day or any other day. Roses still cost more on Valentines than other dates because of supply and demand and since it takes at least two years of production to get a rose crop in flower production from the time a cutting is rooted and the plant is grafted. Growers cannot produce extra roses just for this holiday each year on such a long-term crop. There are hundreds of varieties and colors of roses. Although long stemmed, big budded red roses are the most popular in our country many sweethearts may prefer yellow, pink, white, orange or other colors of roses. In Italy blue roses are the most popular and since there are no true blue roses yet – they take white roses and dye them bright blue with coloring soaked up through the cut stems. There are always some rose novelties or specialty crops to add extra excitement.  This year a new rose is being introduced with stems as long as 6’ topped off with large rose flowers. A Utah company has patented and is marketing a system of personalized roses where they are able to print a custom message on the rose petals, like Rodd loves Dona!,  Be my sweetheart!, Will you marry me? or your message of choice. They are licensing the technology around the world. In my opinion it is hard to top the beauty of roses or any of the other many beautiful flowers and their own natural beauty.

All cut flowers will last longer if you keep them in clean water with a little cut flower food or flower preservative added to extend their vase life. If you get the flowers dry (not in water) make a fresh cut at the bottom of the stem and place them in clean water with preservative as soon as possible. Strip off any foliage or leaves that will be below the water line in order to help keep the water clean longer before you need to change the water. Cut flowers will hold up better if not placed immediately in front of a heater or heat vent and actually will last longer when displayed in a cool room. If your sweetheart prefers daises, amaryllis, bird of paradise, anthuriums or any of the hundreds of other cut flower choices surprise her with a beautiful bouquet of her favorite flowers on this special day when cupid matches lovers. Beautiful flowers help us remind our significant other that they are not taken for granted and are truly special and important to us. Some sweethearts prefer a living plant such as a blooming orchid, miniature rose, blooming tulips, hyacinths, paperwhites, daffodils, kalanchoe, cyclamen or a beautiful houseplant to be cherished for years like a spathiphyllum, dracaena, ficus or other special plant that brings back or creates memories.

 I know some couples who share their love by planting a tree together or selecting a rose bush to add to their yard this spring. There is certainly nothing wrong with giving a beautiful bouquet with chocolates or presenting flowers before you head to a memorable dinner together to make the holiday truly special. We wish you a very happy and special Valentines Day if you are already with the love of your life or we hope that you find true love this year and it adds an extra dimension to your life as your love grows for one another.

Houseplants add warmth and life to any home and can change the look and feel of a room but they seem even more special in the winter when so much of our outdoor vegetation is dried up and brown and we are inside more of each day. Besides adding color and interest to your home, plants can literally help freshen the air as they naturally take in and process carbon dioxide and other gases that are not good for us and produce lots of fresh oxygen our bodies do need. For many years now NASA has been experimenting with air filters for the space station and although they certainly use a variety of mechanical, ionic and mineral filters they have found that growing, respirating and transpiring plants are one of the best filters for contaminants and an excellent generator of oxygen. Certain plants like Chlorophytum or airplane plants excel at cleaning the air and have earned space on the space station even though they don’t produce anything the astronauts can eat but somebody decided what they breathe is pretty important and that is where many foliage or houseplants excel.

Besides their role as clean air machines there is a trend towards recognizing and using houseplants as living art. This trend probably started in Europe but is being widely adopted here in the United States to select and place houseplants in groupings to create a visual effect, in mixed pots or dish gardens, grown in bonsai, braided, poodle, espaliered or numerous other unique shapes to create interest or drama. Most of the larger size foliage houseplants are grown in Florida or California where they get bountiful sunlight and don’t have to use as much heat or energy to grow these slow growing warm blooded crops. They are then shipped here for your selection and enjoyment. The cheaper houseplants are usually sun grown but may drop more leaves and have a harder time adjusting to your low light in the house while the better foliage plants are acclimated under increasing shade for weeks or months before shipping. This acclimating costs more but almost always increases your chances of house plant success.

Your collection of house plants will often vary in physical size, pot size, type of soil mix and growth rate or vigor so watering will vary depending on the plant and you should generally not just water everything because it is Tuesday or some other set day. Observe your plants, feel the soil and wait to water until lightly dry and then water good. Wait to water again until dry again. Big plants in small pots will need water more often while small plants in big pots will need water less often.  Most houseplants don’t really need much fertilizer because they are growing at such a slow pace in low light. You can feed with a liquid fertilizer every fourth or fifth watering or use a slow release fertilizer every 4 to 6 months. There are a few pest problems you can face like white fuzzy mealy bugs or very small red spiders that leave little yellow dots on the leaves where they have sucked and if they get real bad they will actually create fine webbing. These and other pest problems are pretty easy to solve with a systemic insecticide, aerosol indoor plant bomb or by mixing a little general purpose insecticide in your sprayer and thoroughly spraying your plants. The bigger problems are the tendency to overwater houseplants which causes the roots to drown or have a shortage of oxygen and weakens the plant to be attacked by rots or funguses. When watering it is better to err to the dry side rather than the wet side if you are unsure whether to water. The other major problem which causes a slow degeneration of most foliage plants is low light. Compared to 5000 to 15000 footcandles out in the yard on a bright day. Most places in your home have only 50 to 200 footcandles of light so many plants will slowly go downhill. Place the plants near windows or under lights to get as much light as possible and adjust to the idea of using a plant for several months or years depending on the light and then replace it with a fresh new energetic plant. You can also renew or re-energize many of your houseplants in the spring, summer or fall by moving them out on your patio or under trees. Remember they will need more water in the higher light but will usually produce a flush of new growth when given a chance to “vacation” outside. You can pinch and prune your plants to control their growth, to shape them and to get cuttings which you can try to propagate.

There are many wonderful choices in houseplants these days far beyond the normal rubber plants, weeping figs and scheffeleras.  Visit your local nursery, garden center or florist and select some houseplants and start purifying your air and creating a style or personality for your home.