Felder Rushing shares advice and thoughts on gardening.
How do I tell what kind of winter we had? By the plants that get the most damage. I call them “marker” plants and look for them to let me know just how cold it got.
It’s been scattered, with some plants on the Coast getting more damage than their counterparts up in the Delta. Partly because some plants were slightly hardened by earlier cold weather, while others were caught by sudden temperature drops while still tender.
In parts of the state, figs got killed to the ground, but they are coming up from the ground. Flower buds on blueberries in a lot of places got zapped, but a lot seem to be fine. Palm-like sagos were uniformly browned out, but many are sprouting back out. Windmill palms in the Jackson area seemed to come through fine, but farther north they may need replacing.
In all cases, about the only thing we can do is wait and see. New growth can come out on plants with damage to lower trunks, only to die when it gets hot. Best thing is to check the bark with your thumbnail; if it’s bright green right underneath, it’s alive and can sprout later. If there are splits down near the ground, is a bad sign of severe trunk damage that sometimes takes months to show up in dying branches.
Don’t push damaged plants with a lot of fertilizer. Let them catch their second wind before forcing a lot of new growth that plants may not be able to support when it gets hot.
Take your time. Gardening is not as predictable as we would like.
Like most peonies, a lot of daffodils need more cold than we get here. So whenever we have a normal winter that has plenty of cold weather, I enjoy seeing one of my all-time favorite spring bulbs, a type of Narcissus called twin sisters. It is a natural hybrid between the multiple-flowered kind called tazetta and a more Northern variety called poeticus, and it has usually two matching flowers per stem. Those are white with a yellow cup and fragrant.
Twin sisters is the latest-blooming Narcissus for us, usually in late April and early May. If you plant it, and the late December “paperwhite” Narcissus, you can have fragrant, cut-flower-quality daffodils for five months. Sweet.
Just looking for silver linings here. Good weather or bad, we can have fun plants.
To email Felder Rushing, go to www.felderrushing.net.
Weekend Garden Tips
• Treat fire ant mounds with liquid fire ant killer mixed in a gallon of water poured over and in a circle around each mound late in the day. By morning, the poison is as gone as the ants.
• Little red and black bugs on tomatoes are young “leaf footed” stink bug relatives. Easy to kill while small, hard as heck to kill once grown. Use natural or chemical pesticides carefully.