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Index : Plant Care
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- 33. It's Time To Tidy Up The Garden - Top
- Now that Winter is fully upon us, garden and landscape activities have slowed considerably. That makes it an ideal time to clean-up outdoors in preparation for the Spring growing season.
Leaf and twig litter from garden and landscape plants should be cleaned up and disposed of. If you have a compost bin, the litter can be used to your advantage to make compost. If not bag it up and throw it away. Getting rid of the litter will help reduce future insect and disease problems thorough the oldest control method known: sanitation!
If certain garden plants have been badly infest with insects such as mites, whitefly, or scale; throw them away. Proper composting will kill these pests, however, composting is not always thorough and these pests could reinfect the garden next spring.
Cleaning up weeds also provides sanitation. More importantly, if you eliminate the weeds you'll get rid of weed seeds that could germinate later this Winter. Many unwanted plants sprout each year, these plants are called "volunteers". They may or may not be true weeds. Brittlebush and desert marigold are desirable wildflowers but may become a nuisance as they pop up in uncontrolled locations in the landscape. Others like fountain grass and desert broom are truly invasive and should be eliminated when detected.
Spent flowers and flower stalks should be pruned off. Plants like penstemon, salvia, hesperaloe, bird-of-paradise, yucca and others with dried stalks of spikes can be pruned. This grooming process keeps plants healthier and more vigorous.
Winter dormant perennials, such as Salvia, Calylophus, Helianthus, Rudbeckia and ornamental grasses can be cut back to near the ground. They will regrow in the spring, producing new shoots from the basal portion of the plant.
Dead wood and broken branches should be pruned from evergreen trees and shrubs now. Be careful, however, not to prune branches that just look dead. Some freeze damaged plants, such as bougainvillea and lantana, will recover next spring. The easiest way to tell if a branch is dead or alive, is to scratch it with your thumb nail or a sharp knife. Live wood will reveal green sapwood beneath the bark, while dead wood will be brown throughout. Wait until new growth begins in the spring before removing frost injured branches.
Clean up fallen mesquite twigs. They often contain the eggs of a small gray beetle called the "twig pruner". It these twigs are not raked up and removed, the eggs will hatch in the spring and the young pruners will move into the tree. There feeding will cause the tips of branches to die.
Besides cleaning up, it's also a good time to dress up the garden with additional mulch. Organic mulches are great for plants. They help conserve moisture, control weeds, moderate soil temperatures, and increase organic matter. Because they decompose over time, new mulch needs to be added to maintain a layer 3 to 4 inches thick. Forest mulch, chunk bark, and shredded cypress make the best mulches. Rock mulch too, needs a top-dressing of additional stone from time to time. No one knows how it disappears, but it does!
Cleaning up garden debris, pruning and grooming plants, and adding mulch are important Winter gardening activities. Accomplishing them now, will afford you more time this coming Spring for the really fun stuff - planting!
The topic for this week's garden demonstration will be the "How To's" of Drip Irrigation. It will be presented on Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. at the Pima County Extension Center, at 1:00 p.m. at the Wilmot Library, and on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. at Marana Planning Services on the Northeast corner of Orange Grove and Thornydale. Answers to gardening questions may be obtained by phoning 626-5161 in Tucson or 648-0808 in Green Valley.
- Updated: April 19, 2001
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