Garden Planner
March and April
Rose-colored Gardens
Does the idea of growing roses like those pictured in gardening catalogs sound like an impossible dream? Are the descriptions that tout easy to grow and blooms all season long basically… exaggerated? Then you’ll be pleased to know that there is such a rose, and it does, in fact, bloom profusely all season long – even in Dallas. Jackson Perkins Simplicity hedge rose really lives up to the promise of abundant roses from spring until frost. Plant them about two feet apart for the prettiest hedge around. Organic fertilizer and pruning (or cutting them for vases) will make them bloom even more. The original pink variety is most prolific.
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Your March/April Gardening Checklist
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MARCH
- Finish pruning evergreens and summer flowering trees such as crape myrtles by early March.
- Prepare beds for summer vegetables and flowers.
- Fertilize azaleas and camellias after they finish blooming.
- Fertilize roses every four to six weeks from now until September.
- Plant container-grown roses, shrubs, and trees.
- Plant dahlia tubers in rich, well-drained soil.
- Dig and divide summer and fall flowering perennials, bulbs, and rhizomes before they emerge.
- Repot houseplants that have outgrown their containers.
- Fertilize pansies for a final flush of blooms before it gets too hot for them.
- Begin to set out summer annuals in mid to late March.
- Begin to seed Bermuda grass and sod St. Augustine.
- If you haven’t done so yet, sow seeds of cosmos, larkspur, and poppies.
- Begin planting hardy vegetables such as eggplant, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers.
- Turn compost, and add a little fertilizer to it.
- Do preventative treatment for black spot and mildew with a fungicide.
- Watch for aphids, lace bugs, and scale on azaleas, and treat immediately.
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APRIL
- Plant with wild abandon! It is too late for bare root stock, but container-grown and B&B(balled and burlapped) are plentiful and beautiful.
- When choosing what to plant in your garden, think in terms of what you would like to cut and have in your house as well as what you want in your garden.
- Deadhead (remove withered flowers from bloom) established annuals and perennials to perpetuate blooming.
- Watch roses for black spot and treat with a fungicide as soon as symptoms appear.
- After they finish blooming, prune climbing roses, forsythia, quince, and Indian hawthorn.
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Creepy Crawlers
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| The silhouette of a wolf spider crawling along a leaf. |
Gardens are full of life, and not just the green, leafy variety. Furry, feathered, scaly, and multi-pedal creatures teem through our gardens night and day keeping the natural circle of life in balance. Most are so small we never notice them. Those that fall into the creepy crawly category are the most misunderstood of all garden dwellers. A few species that damage plants have given a bad name to a vast number of insects, many of which are harmless or beneficial. (Using broad-spectrum insecticides obliterates huge numbers of insects and can actually be worse for your garden than if you’d done nothing.) Spiders are probably the most unfairly maligned of all insects, being the object of many phobias, but there are only two – the brown recluse and the black widow – of the nearly 900 species in our area that are considered poisonous to humans. The rest are tremendously beneficial garden friends since they eat flies, moths, mosquitos, and other insects that may damage plants. Some spiders might look fierce – nature’s way of fending off predators – but don’t be fooled. Look for fuzzy black and white jumping spiders, which can also be brightly colored; large, night-hunting wolf spiders with their brown and black longitudinal stripes, and the garden orb weaver, whose large yellow and black body is about the size of a quarter with very long, graceful legs (sometimes three inches or more) that look like they have black stockings on them.
