Published by The Garden Club of Austin JANUARY 2015 Vol. 52 Issue 1 PRUNING. Why, When & How

Transcription

1 Austin Gardener Published by The Garden Club of Austin JANUARY 2015 Vol. 52 Issue 1 CALENDAR The following events are of direct interest to the membership of The Garden Club of Austin. All events are at the Austin Area Garden Center in Zilker Botanical Garden at 2220 Barton Springs Road unless otherwise noted. Additional gardening calendar information may be found at varying times in the Life and Arts Section of the Austin American Statesman. JANUARY 22 Monthly board meeting: 1/12 FEBRUARY 26 Monthly board meeting: 2/23 MARCH 12 Monthly board meeting: 3/9 APRIL 23 Monthly board meeting: 4/13 MAY 28 Monthly board meeting: 5/25 JANUARY PROGRAM PRUNING Why, When & How Please join us on Thursday, January 22nd when TreeFolks will be presenting on: PRUNING and will answer the questions on WHY do we prune, WHEN do we prune and HOW do we prune? This valuable information on tree pruning will be presented by two experienced staff members from TreeFolks. Here are their bios: Rebecca Johnson, Education and Outreach Coordinator Rebecca Johnson earned a B.S. in Forestry from Oklahoma State University and is an ISA (International Society of Arboriculture) Certified Arborist. She has always looked for ways to educate people about the wonderful trees and natural resources around them. As a Texas Master Naturalist, she devoted many hours educating citizens at tree adoption and tree planting events. Paul Schuman, Forest Services Specialist Paul is an ISA (International Society of Arboriculture) Certified Arborist with over 20 years of experience in tree care operations. He grew up in Wyoming, where he owned and operated a tree service since 1993 and served on the City of Buffalo Tree Board. In 2011, he moved to Austin bringing his tree service with him. Please feel free to bring a guest to the meeting. The refreshments and social begin at 7:00 pm, followed by a brief business meeting and the program begins at 7:30 pm. Lois Koho

2 PRESIDENTS MESSAGE Happy New Year! AustinGardener President Laura Joseph 1st Vice Presidents Lois Koho, Lea Giberson 2nd Vice President John Fox 3rd Vice President Elizabeth Wong Secretary Molly Clark Treasurer Annie Hackebeil Historian Luby Garza-Abijaoude Newsletter Layout/Design Dwain Osborne Web Master Liz Stansfeld AAGC Representative Wilburn Hackebeil Directors: Term extending through 2014 Wilburn Hackebeil Marilyn Metcalf Term extending through 2015 Laura Holland, Joe Yura Term extending through 2016 Joyce Fox, Joe Defoe The Garden Club of Austin, Inc. was established in 1953 and is currently affiliated with The Gardeners of America/Men s Garden Clubs of America (TGOA/MGCA), the Southwest Region of MGCA and the Austin Area Garden Council. Meetings are open to the public and held in the Austin Area Garden Center on the fourth Thursday of the month except for November (the third Thursday) and December (an awards banquet). Membership inquiries should be directed to our treasurer, Annie Hackebeil, at Questions or comments concerning the newsletter should be sent to the editor, Dwain Osborne, dwainosborne@ yahoo.com January is a good time to get things in order and be thinking about my garden. All the exciting catalogs start coming, and I love to curl up by the fire and begin planning what needs to be started indoors and what I will plant in the garden. I usually start papayas about now, and my January routine always includes paperwhites. I find paperwhite (Narcissus tazetta) bulbs online as well as markdowns after Christmas. (I do check inside those boxes and make sure bulbs are still good, but I find tremendous values at Home Depot and Lowe s as well as area nurseries and garden centers.) Most of the locally available paperwhites are Ziva, an early bloomer which is very easy to grow. I highly recommend that you add a few pots of paperwhites which will make your home smell wonderfully as well as brighten your day. Here s how you start paperwhites: You can grow paperwhites in soil or in water. I like growing in soil a bit better because stalks seems to stand up when they are well rooted in soil, but water works nicely too. Chances are you will have to tie a ribbon around the stalks to hold them upright or stake with chopsticks. In soil, fill about 8 PAGE 2 inch pots with potting soil and add about 5 bulbs. Cover bulbs with soil and water in well. Let drain. Place pots in cool area for about a week to stimulate roots. Then move to a warm, sunny spot to encourage foliage and flowers. Turn pots often to encourage straight stalks. Keep soil slightly moist by placing an ice cube or two every 3-4 days. I like to add pots of blooming paperwhites to the kitchen as well as the coffee table. They will look good for about two weeks, and the fragrance is heavenly. To grow in water, select a shallow, clear dish, and add gravel. Fill with bulbs and then add more gravel. Try to keep about a third of each bulb above gravel. Add water until it reaches base of the bulbs, and maintain that level by adding water as needed. You will definitely need to tie up stalks, but a lovely ribbon will make your bulb display more festive. Place in a cool area for about a week and then move to a warmer, sunny spot so you can enjoy the magnificent show. See you at garden club. Laura Joseph

3 GARDENING CHECKLIST Gardening Checklist for Jan./Feb. It s not too early to be out preparing your vegetable garden and flowerbeds for spring planting. Spading and/or tilling should be done as soon as possible. Add lots of organic matter (such as recently fallen leaves) to improve your soil. According to the Travis County Extension Service, you could be planting carrots, leaf lettuce, onion plants, radishes, shallots and spinach in the garden now. By mid February beets, chard, endive, parsley, potatoes and turnips can be planted. Seeds of most all other vegetables and spring annual flowers can be sown indoors during January and February for later transplanting to the garden or bed after danger of frost is past. All dormant season pruning can be done now through late February. Use proper tools and make cuts close and clean. Wait to prune forsythia, spirea, gardenias, climbing roses, azaleas, camellias, and other spring flowering shrubs until after they bloom. Prune with a purpose, not because there is nothing else to do. January is the best month to prune oak trees susceptible to oak wilt disease (for example, live oaks and red oaks). Even so, you should still plan to use an approved tree wound dressing/sealer, especially on the larger cuts of one inch or more in diameter. January through early February is a great time to apply dormant oil sprays to control scale and other hard to manage insect pests. Be sure to read and follow label directions. If necessary you may also want to go out and give your yard another raking to keep the fallen leaves from smothering your grass. Don t throw them away. Instead, spade or till them into your garden, put them in your compost pile, or use them for mulch. Those of you with live oak trees can expect more falling leaves in a couple months. By now, you have probably received several seed catalogs in the mail. Don t be misled by all of the pretty pictures. Not all varieties of vegetables and flowers do well in Central Texas even if it says they will grow in our hardiness zone. Check with the Travis County Extension Horticulturist, 1600B Smith Road, Austin (telephone ) for a list of recommended varieties. SOURCE: Norman Wagner 2015 Membership Dues Time to pay dues for Membership runs from January through December. Dues are $25.00 per member, $40.00 for two persons residing in the same home. Please bring to meeting or send to Annie Hackebeil at 652 S. Monroe St. LaGrange, TX Make checks out to TGCOA. PAGE 3

4 HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW? Wintertime Petunias Eby Laura Holland ver travel outside of Texas (where the summers are not hot) and notice how perfectly gorgeous the annuals can be..right in the middle of summer? Beautiful hanging baskets of petunias, alyssum, geraniums, and just as full as can be! Well, there is probably not a gardener struggling daily to keep these plants looking nice. They are in a cooler climate and can easily thrive without much help from a human, other than water. They bloom, and bloom, and bloom. Petunias are an annual that just don t do very well for very long in our central Texas climate. And that is because they become available in the early spring, and look gorgeous, then just as soon as it begins to get hot, which here in Texas could be in April and May, they begin to get leggy, have long thin running stems with blooms only at the end, and of course by summer they are looking well worn out and you can kiss them goodbye. Well I have discovered a way to keep them thick and full and blooming, not only throughout the summer but into the winter, up until we get our first really hard killing frost. I learned about this trick on an internet gardening site (not a local one either) and it works! I m sure you all know how important it is to deadhead your flowers, to keep them blooming. This applies to annuals, perennial natives, and roses. Well, on my petunias, I would always just pull off the bloom and discard it, Petunias are an annual that just doesn t do very well for very long in our central Texas climate without a little help. thinking I was really helping the plant. Well, you are, but if you simply pull it off without pinching off the little seed pod under it, you are actually encouraging that bloom stem to go to seed, and thus eventually die. When I would pull off the dead blooms, I would notice that wherever I detached it, there would shortly thereafter be a pointed hard pocket of tiny seeds, which I diligently would disperse into the soil, thinking I would have so many more plants growing from these. Well, that just didn t happen, usually because it would get so hot that the tiny plants just couldn t survive. I rarely saw baby petunias coming up beside my mature ones. And by the way, I do believe that petunias do way better in containers than in the ground. They are small delicate plants, and you can have more control over them in pots. PAGE 6 Ok, so back to the trick. Pinch just below the bloom itself and include the base of the bloom. I know this part has a botanical name, but I will have to look that up and get back to you. It s the tiny place where the bloom connects.just below that. What will eventually happen when you do this is that the plant will NOT go to seed and will get fuller and fuller and fuller, and stay much more compact and attractive. It will not develop those ugly long streamers with a few weak blooms on the end. I fertilize my petunias often, every week or every other week with a high phosphorous fertilizer to keep them blooming nicely. You can start out though with a high nitrogen food to get their foliage established and strong and green.as you

5 would do to bougainvilleas..hibiscus food works well to provide this nitrogen. (I ll talk more about bougainvilleas in the spring because there are some neat tricks to getting those beautiful too.) Today is January 9th, and we got a pretty good freeze a few days ago. This is what my petunias look like today. The photos with the gnome are what my petunias looked like on January 7th. The two other photos were taken on January 4th. I lightly covered them with a plant wrap, but they still look great cross fingers. And I imagine that once this cold snap is over, they will perk back up..i know the freeze will eventually take them, but I have been able to enjoy them much longer than usual. Enjoy! JAN. 4 JAN. 7 JAN. 9 PAGE 7

6 HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW? Winter Thriving Plants Fascinating and unusual, they provide cheer during cold winter days Aby Reggie Leuty s winter season quickly sneaks up on us and most plants lay dormant winter growing plants begin to cheer us up and bring us out of the cold winter cloudy blues with their beautiful flowers and amazing day to day growing activities. I myself am a big fan of winter growing plants. Many of them are fascinating with some of the most unusual and prettiest of flowers. Fortunately, with the more sensitive winter growers, ie. many Madagascar and South African species, there are most days from late fall through early spring you can safely grow winter growers outdoors with the exception of a few hard freezes that come and go during those times. In which during those hard freezes, you ll want to bring those plants indoors next to a sunny window until the freeze passes. This month will we discuss a wide variety of winter growing plants such as aloes, Japanese maples, as well as winter flowers such as Cyclamen, Mexican marigold, snap dragon vine, coral honeysuckle. Aloe Plants When we think of Aloe plants, most of us think of Aloe vera, but there are over five hundred different species. All aloes range from Africa to Madagascar and throughout various islands in the Indian Ocean. They have a tubular flower with colors ranging from orange, yellow, red, and pink. Although most aloes are cultivated and grown for ornamental purposes, there are a few that do have other alternative reasons. Aside from the well known Aloe vera, we have species such as Aloe ferox, Aloe perryi, Winter growing plants to cheer us up and bring us out of the cold winter cloudy blues with their beautiful flowers and amazing day to day growing activities. Clyclaman Aloe vulgaris, and Aloe indica that have been used for medicinal purposes. Aloes come in a variety of sizes. Some species such as Aloe bowiea and Aloe haworthioides amazingly stay three inches or less. The PAGE 8 giant species are known as Tree Aloes. These species can grow over 18 meters with the trunk having a circumference of 0.9 meters. Aloe barberae, Aloe dichotoma, and Aloe Africana are some of the giants among this family of plants. If you ve ever been to Africa, Madagascar, or even southern California, you will see just how prehistoric these trees look. These are some of the most unusual looking plants that have endure the driest and harshest times and have even seen the dinosaur age come and go. But will they endure the stress of environmental pressures and changes? Most aloe species are endangered and some go extinct before even being described. Japanese Maples If you ever see a Japanese Maple Tree, you might agree there s not a lot of trees that compete with it s gracefulness and beauty. As this maple tree sways back and forth in the fall and winter winds, it seems to dance much like a ballerina dancer. In 1800 s, Japan introduced this plant to parts of the world with temperate climates. Europe was one of the first countries to see this plant and it wasn t until much later did this plant arrived onto the North American soils. The Japanese Maple has over a thousand cultivars with size differences from dwarf to very large as well as various leaf shapes. The dwarf cultivars are very popular with bonsai enthusiasts. The

7 large cultivars are used in landscaping and can reach up to twenty five meters. Crimeson Queen and Bloodgood cultivars seem to do very well in shade here in Central Texas. Cyclamen Valued for their flowers with petals upsweep, variably pattern leaves, and numerous cultivars, there s one you will surely fall in love with, the Cyclamen. Many cultivars have been selectively bred for a wide range of flower colors and double flowers. There are large forms are well as miniature forms. Most Cyclamen cultivars are mass produced in Germany and the Netherlands. There are about twenty three species of Cyclamen and are part of the Primrose family. Their habitats range woodland, through scrub and rocky terrain, to alpine meadows where they will flower in snow. In cultivation, there are some species which are definitely hardy, some which are more temperament, and a few species which will not tolerate any frost. Native to Mediterranean, Middle East, Eastern and Southern Europe, the Cyclamen will thrive quiet well in most Central Texas yards. This plant is poisonous if ingested so be careful if you have pets or other domesticated animals. Japanese Maple Trees Mexican Tarragon Mexican tarragon or Texas tarragon could also be called the Mexican Marigold. These lovely flowers are native to the United States, Mexico and Central America and grow in other parts of the world such as Africa and France with the proper climate and moderate temperatures favorable to marigold growth. Surprisingly the Mexican marigold has a number of culinary and medicinal uses. Mexican marigolds have been used as a beverage, medicinal tea and condiments by Native Americans in South America before This flower was used as a Native American remedy for the common cold, stomach upset and diarrhea. This plant will Aloe ferox happily bloom from summer season and well into the winter days. Used as a culinary additive, petals provide a colorful garnish for salads. The flowers can be combined with other edible herbs for cooking purposes, used as a substitute for tarragon, and steeped for a soothing tea. The oil of the marigold plant may be used as a flavoring in food products and perfumes. Snap Dragon Vine Another Mediterranean native that Texas hummingbirds love is the Snap Dragon Vine. This particular plant may wilt and stress a bit in the summer heat, but when fall and winter temperatures come, the Snap Dragon will perk right up. Some varieties are as small as six inches while the large varieties can reach over five feet. This plant blooms in a variety of colors, including purple, bronze, red, and white. These flowers do have a fragrant smell. The snapdragon flower is named after its dragon-like appearance, with the jaws that can easily be snapped open and closed. These flowers have a long history that goes beyond being a simple floral plaything. As its otherworldly appearance may suggest, the snapdragon has long been associated with magical thinking. In Germany, if a snapdragon was hung over a baby s bed, the child would be safe from evil spirits. They have also been thought to drive away witches, restore youthfulness and beauty to women, as well as bring back vigor and energy in everyone. In the Middle Ages, these flowers Mexican Tarragon were often weaved into the hair of maidens so as to make them both gracious and intriguing, and to ward off any unwanted advances. Continued PAGE 9

8 Coral Honeysuckle Vine One Texas native that will surely attract butterflies and humming birds is our wonderful Coral Honeysuckle Vine. This eighteen foot vine will flower red, yellow, coral. This particular vine will bloom in the dead set freezing days of February. The Coral Honeysuckle will not invade and take over like the Japanese Honeysuckle. Hummingbirds and butterflies and this plants nectar and blooms, other bird species want the fruit. Unfortunately, coral honeysuckle needs to be protected from browsing deer. The Coral Honeysuckle is a beautiful glossy green climbing vine and the last pair of leaves are fused together giving an appearance of a perfoliate leaf. This is one of the many Texas native plants that can be seen at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. The world of winter growers is quiet large number of fascinating and wonderful plants that I haven t even begin to scratch the surface. With a little planning and preparation, your garden and yard can be just as bright and colorful in those chilly wintery days as it will be in the refreshing, rejuvenating spring. Surprisingly, having winter growing plants with those irresistible flowers will attract many wildlife such as tree frogs, green anoles, and some of the most interesting insects. Having such plants in your yards can also present some of the best photography moments. Happy Winter Gardening!! Coral Honeysuckle Vine Snap Dragon Vine PAGE 10

9 CLIMATE AT A GLANCE Januar Climate for Austin and Vicinit AVERAGE DAILY MAXIMUM/MINIMUM TEMPERATURES In beginning of month End of month Minimum at beginning of month At end of month EXTREME TEMPERATURES 90-2 Occurred in 1971 Occurred in days At 32 degrees or below AVERAGE MONTHLY PRECIPITATION EXTREME PRECIPITATION RANGE 7 in 7.5 in 1.71 in Snow is rare this month Fell in a 24-hour period in January Fell in during month in in Occurred in in Occurred in 24hr period in in Only a trace, occurred in days Of precipitation observed GENERAL CONDITIONS TIME BETWEEN SUNRISE AND SUNSET 9 Clear days 48 % 6 Partly cloudy days Amount of possible sunshine in December. 4 days 16 Overcast days Dense fog observed Beginning of month End of month 10 hours 14 minutes 10 hours 45 minutes SOURCE: Norman Wagner PAGE 11