Earl Nickel,
Curious Plantsman

Gardening in our mild Bay Area can be a year round endeavor and late winter/early spring offers the opportunity to ready your garden for spring. The experienced gardener knows that having a successful flower garden is more than planting and watering and the winter period is an excellent time to do much needed jobs such as clean up, amending your planting beds or adding bark mulch. And the period of relative rest also is an excellent time to envision a new gardening scheme for your garden.

Winter Prep

One job common to almost every gardener is the need to do some valuable winter clean-up. This can involve refreshing evergreen shrubs or perennials by removing spent blossoms or seedheads, a bit of light pruning to achieve the desired shape and pruning off any weak or dead branches. This minor pruning not only improves the appearance of these plants but invigorates them as well.

Your clean-up may also involve discarding annual plants that have reached their end or deciding to toss a problematic perennial or two that has been struggling for some time. Winter is also the time to top dress any beds containing shrubs or smaller perennials. Though you can’t dig in compost like you can with empty beds, you can still top dress with nutritious compost products such as Double Doody compost and Heritage Organics Earthworm Castings, both available at Annie’s retail nursery. The nutrition will seep into the soil and help to bolster the plants for the coming year’s growth.

If you are fortunate enough to have one or more open beds, it is strongly advised to add nutrition to the soil. It’s also an excellent time to pull out any weeds above or buried in the soil in these areas. To paraphrase that real estate maxim (‘Location, location, location’), healthy plants first start with ‘soil, soil, soil.’ Speaking of weeding, it’s never too early to weed. If nothing else, most of us have that annoying, weedy oxalis up everywhere. You know the kind, with the bright yellow flowers. Try to pull the whole plant out and limit any unnecessary water from reaching the tiny bulbs buried in the soil. This is also the time of year to top-dress certain beds with bark mulch, to both limit weeds and to save on the amount of water needed in spring and summer.

And for those of you with a lawn, it’s a good time to aerate the soil (poking small holes throughout the lawn) and, if needed, to replant bald or problem spots. Most of our Bay Area lawns use a fescue blend so look for that at your local nursery. You may even want to over-seed your entire lawn. Consult with a nursery professional or landscaper about this. Better yet, why not consider replacing part or all of your lawn with drought tolerant plants? Both East Bay Municipal Utility District and Contra Costa Water will pay you to make this conversion. Check their websites for details.

Pruning

Winter is the best time to prune many shrubs and trees, especially those that are deciduous. That list includes deciduous fruit trees such as apples, pears, peaches, plums etc., as well as deciduous shrubs such as hydrangeas,  hibiscus and philadelphus.

Winter is also the time to prune your roses. Though there isn’t space here to cover pruning techniques for the great variety of deciduous shrubs or trees, a little research or consultation will ultimately benefit your garden.

A New Spring Plan

Winter can be an excellent time to re-imagine your garden. This can be as simple as deciding on plants to be selected for filling in open spaces or as involved as rethinking your entire garden layout. It’s a time to look at your garden with ‘new’ eyes, and deciding bed by bed, sometimes plant by plant, what is working and what might need changing. Sometimes this is simply refreshing an existing bed and sometimes it affords you the exciting opportunity to do something entirely new, such as making one bed all California natives or a bed filled with plants that attract pollinators. The ideas are endless.

On a micro level, this re-imagining might involve tossing certain plants, whether due to them having fared poorly or because they don’t fit into the new design scheme. This is NOT a defeat but a creative re-imagining of your garden’s potential. I recommend a visit to Annie’s Annuals to talk to the friendly and knowledgeable staff about design ideas and valuable info on particular plants.

A More Organized Garden

Although everybody gardens in a manner that works best for them, I want to offer the idea that keeping track of the plants in your garden can be a useful tool for garden planning. This ‘accounting’ can be as basic as putting plant ID tags in a jar or as organized as creating a Word doc list of your plants and their locations. Because I have a ‘one-of-a-kind’ garden with hundreds of plants spread out in 20 or so planting beds, I do maintain such a list in my computer. It is a bit of work first entering that data but once it’s there, it’s very easy to add or subtract a plant. And noting the location for each can really come in handy.

Another useful garden planning tool is keeping a journal. This can be for your own pleasure (what’s new in the garden) or for keeping track of various developments in the garden, a list of projects for the near future and more.

Lastly, photographing your garden can provide more than just the pleasure of recording the fruits of your hard work. It can also serve as a snapshot or record of what your garden looked like at different times of the year. This can later be a helpful aid for planning the layout of your garden.

Finding Plants at Annie’s

Annie’s website is the best resource for finding out more info on Annie’s Annuals plants.  Some of the Annie’s Annuals plants mentioned here might not be available on the week that you’re reading this blog article. A quick look at that plant’s page on the website will let you know if it’s available.

On each plant’s page, if it says Add to Cart, that plant is available for sale now. If it says Add to Wishlist, that plant is not yet available. To use the Wishlist, just click that link to add any plant to your Wishlist and we’ll send you an email when it’s ready.  If you live nearby and want to know what is currently available in the retail nursery (which differs from what is online), check out the link to Retail Plant Availability on their homepage or click here for a pdf version.

Tags: Garden Maintence