At the garden today, Jeff Raska will demonstrate orchard pruning. We have begun the task, but now it is time to hear from our expert. Our garden is bursting with energy, seedlings are sprouting, and things once dormant are alive again.
We hope you will also come out to work with us or take a spring stroll through the garden. Thank you to Starla for these pictures. Information will be coming about our spring plant sale on May 19th.
Ann Lamb
Pictures by Starla Willis
Tickets for the Dallas County Master Gardener Association (DCMGA) 2022 Spring Garden Tour are now on sale! They can be purchased for $15 through 6:00 pm on Friday, April 29th on the DCMGA website or online for $20 on the days of the Tour or at any of the gardens. Your ticket is good for either or both days, Saturday, April 30 from 10 am to 4 pm and Sunday, May 1 from 1 to 5 pm. There are six residential gardens and one school garden on the Tour, all located north of I-635 between Carrollton/Farmers Branch and Richardson. New this year, all the gardens will be PlantTAGG® -enabled, allowing tour visitors to access the most current, research-based horticultural information about featured plants using their cell phones. There will also be a variety of educational programs presented in the gardens.
You can preview all of the Tour’s stunning gardens on the DCMGA website: https://dallascountymastergardeners.org/first-peek-at-our-spring-garden-tour
Click here to buy your tickets: https://form.jotform.com/220395346419156
I will listen to anything anyone has to say about about growing tomatoes. I have a tomato app on my phone. I’ve taken meticulous notes at many a tomato class. And what I have learned through experience is that tomatoes will break your heart in a new way every year. So select your varieties carefully- heirlooms for flavor, hybrids for disease resistance – and don’t even try the gigantic beefsteak ones you remember from your youth. Too much will go wrong before they are ready. Okay, try a big flavorful heirloom but hedge your bet with Sun Golds and Early Girls.
This year in the north garden we are going to try the Florida weave trellising technique to get the vines off the ground and improve the air circulation. The tomatoes in the how-to diagrams look very well behaved. I’m anticipating an amorphous blob of vines unless we prune daily, which will become a test of faith by the middle of April.
My best tip for obtaining delicious tomatoes for your BLTs is to make friends with someone’s uncle who has been growing tomatoes for a hundred years. Then one day your friend will say her uncle died and you will say you are so sorry to hear that while thinking, “I hope it wasn’t the one who grew tomatoes.”
Beverly Allen, Dallas County Master Gardener Class of 2018
Is it just the name? Why don’t more gardeners plant purple wintercreeper?
Listed on AgriLife Water University’s Top 100 Plants for North Texas , purple wintercreeper is one of the five groundcovers listed along with horse herb, frog fruit, snake herb and grey santolina. Texas gardener, Neil Sperry, also gives it a thumbs up.
It is evergreen, grows in full sun or partial shade, has reddish-purple fall and winter color and provides a wonderful texture to the garden floor. You might consider planting it instead of the ubiquitous Asian jasmine because it isn’t damaged by our cold weather temperatures.
Purple wintercreeper is easily established in a large area needing ground cover, just add mulch around the new plants and water as you would any new planting. After establishment, purple wintercreeper thrives on a moderate watering schedule.
Drip irrigation would be perfect as shown in this first photo.
In the next few weeks our thoughts will turn to spring, but while considering ground covers please don’t forget the one with the funny name, purple wintercreeper.
Ann Lamb, Dallas County Master Gardener Class of 2005
Valentine’s Day this year is on a Monday and we are staying home for a warm, cozy dinner by the fire. Our menu isn’t going to be fancy. Instead, we’ve chosen to flavor it with a touch of nostalgia. To start our meal, the salad course is a revisit of an iconic 60’s dish known as “Southern Wilted Lettuce Salad with Hot Bacon Dressing”. Wilted lettuce is also known as “killed lettuce” or “kilt lettuce” because the greens soften under the hot, tangy dressing. It was my late father-in-law’s favorite salad. Grandmother prepared it for him at least a few times a month.
Wilted lettuce salad likely came from Eastern Europe with versions of it appearing in Poland and other countries. After the dish traveled to America with immigrants, Southerners began putting their spin on this wonderfully delectable salad. And, in true southern style, it was enjoyed with freshly baked cornbread or cornbread muffins.
Outdoor spring seed starting season for lettuce is typically sometime between February 1st and March 15th so now is a good time to consider your options. A sturdy, spring lettuce such as romaine, spinach or red leaf works well for this salad. Look for other varieties that will keep some of their “crunch” when tossed with the hot bacon dressing.
Botanical Interests features a Chef’s Gourmet Spicy Mix with over six different texture-filled greens to excite your taste buds. Guerney’s offers a Premium Lettuce Seed Blend with a colorful combination of various textures and shapes. Have fun planning your spring salad garden.
Southern Wilted Lettuce with Hot Bacon Dressing
Linda Alexander, Dallas County Master Gardener Class of 2008
Don’t believe it when garden writers say winter is a time to relax. Here in the north garden vegetable area we are speeding up to get everything done in time for spring.
The cooler temperatures make it great time to take on hardscaping projects. We made an 80 foot long blackberry trellis from cattle panels and T-posts. The cattle panels are inexpensive, sturdy, and versatile but their 16 foot length requires some planning for how to transport them.
The vertically trained blackberry canes will get more sun and the berries will be much easier (and less hazardous) to harvest. Fortunately we pruned the second year floricanes after they fruited last summer making the task of training the remaining canes much easier.
The vegetable team has been hard at work sheet mulching to create four new in ground beds. We are also amending the soil in the Donation Garden and former watermelon patch with mycorrhizal fungi, dried molasses, and compost to enhance nutrient uptake. We have planted fava beans in the central in ground bed to fix nitrogen for the next crop.
January is the time to plant short day and intermediate day onion slips in Dallas. The day length refers to the amount of sunlight needed for the onions to bulb. We have planted the sunniest side of the Donation Garden with two short day varieties, the TAMU developed Texas Super Sweet Onion which is on the Texas Superstar list; and a disease resistant hybrid called Southern Belle Red Onion.
It is also a very busy time for seed starting. Buttercrunch lettuce started indoors on December 23 was ready to plant but the unusually warm December weather turned into a wave of freezes after New Year’s Day. We ended up harvesting the outer leaves in a “cut and come again” fashion and adding them to a food bank donation of salad greens and the last of the fall tomatoes. The lettuce seedlings can still be transplanted outdoors and will tolerate light frost (28 to 33 degrees Fahrenheit).
We are cutting it a little bit close but can still start our tomato seeds before the end of January. This year we are sticking mainly with small and medium size tomatoes. Why? There is less time for things to go wrong before they mature! Our varieties will include Super Sweet 100, Sweetie, Sun Gold, Early Girl, Roma, and Berkeley Tie Dye Pink, which was submitted as a favorite by area gardeners to The Dallas Garden School.
The Atlantis F1 Hybrid Mini Broccoli produced very well but we lost several plants during the worst of the early January freezes. Because it requires only a few weeks to mature we will able to have a second crop along with another fast maturing mini broccoli called Sweet Stem F1.
We tried several varieties of peppers last year and were pleased with how productive and easy to grow they were. Also, our preschool visitors were delighted when they were each allowed to pick one. This year we will be growing Jimmy Nardello, Gypsy, North Star, Marconi Rossi, Tajin, and Aji Dulce peppers. They can be started indoors by seed now and throughout February.
Radishes require only about a month to mature so we have a habit of planting the seeds anywhere we have a bit of extra space during the cooler months. Spinach takes 40 – 60 days but can be planted outdoors now through early March. It has been another easy to grow crop.
Garden writers, take note, winter is a time to get a lot done that will make spring and summer more productive.
Beverly Allen, Dallas County Master Gardener Class of 2018
Dallas Garden Buzz readers, save this for next year’s ideas or refresh your arrangements now from your garden. We wish you a Merry Christmas and thank you, Linda!
You may be thinking of a Bowl Game or the ever popular football playoffs occurring this month. As with many spouses, mine included, sports seem to dominate the evening and weekend television options. My time has been spent unpacking boxes and deciding how to repurpose over 50 years of collected Christmas treasures. But this year I’m going to approach it differently and with a more natural touch. I’ve made the decision to go green for Christmas 2021.
For me, there is no better way to breathe the spirit of Christmas into my home than decorating with greenery from the garden. Boxwood, holly and magnolia are ‘the big three’ growing abundantly in our yard. Most of them are over 40 years old and have plenty of foliage to share.
Let’s discover a few simple ways to allow freshly gathered greenery to invigorate our senses and fill our homes with the fragrance of nature. May the warmth of the holiday season bring you joy and peace this year.
Linda Alexander, Dallas County Master Gardener Class of 2008
Poinsettias are so pretty at Christmas. Click here for an article to help you care for them. It was written in 2005 but it is still pertinent. After reading it, I realized my poinsettias would rather not be on my front porch. They are now indoors getting indirect, natural light.
For information about recycling your amaryllis bulbs after Christmas, read here.
Merry Christmas to all our readers. We plan to have at least one more article this year and loads more gardening advice in 2022.
Ann Lamb, Dallas County Master Gardener Class of 2005
Woody herbs are all perennials and usually hardy plants with leaves, blossoms and woody stems that contain their essential oils. Their relatively high content of volatile oils gives them an extremely aromatic fragrance. Woody herbs retain more of their flavor and aroma when dried than most green herbs do. In the garden, woody herbs require far less water than green herbs. The most important consideration is that these herbs be planted where they have good drainage.
Our journey into creating a garden bed featuring woody herbs began almost four years ago. We started with a combination of both woody and green herbs. The first few years all watering was done by hand. Then, in October of 2019, a drip system was installed. Sometime around mid-spring of this year, we noticed that our plants weren’t thriving. A soil test revealed that the garden was low in nitrogen but moderate to high in phosphorus, potassium and other minerals. Organic matter was 9.36%.
After doing further research, we read an article advising that two things to avoid when starting a Mediterranean garden were horse manure and wood chips. We had unknowingly used both when building our bed. A decision was made to excavate the existing soil 6-8 inches down and start fresh.
On November 11th, Soil Building Systems delivered 5 cubic yards of a rose mix selected especially for our Mediterranean bed. Volunteers worked carefully while spreading the mix to create a mound shape for optimal drainage requirements. Once established, a protective plastic weed barrier was custom cut to cover the entire bed. Using a box cutter, an “x” was made in the plastic where each herb was planted. The finishing touch was a 3 inch topping of pea gravel to give our bed the look of gardens circling the Mediterranean basin.
The short list of woody herbs found in most Mediterranean gardens includes:
Bay Laurel (Laurus nobilis)
Lavender (Lavandula species)
Marjoram and Oregano (Origanum marjorana and vulgare)
Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis)
Sage (Salvia officinalis)
Thyme (Thymus vulgaris)
Winter Savory (Satureja montana)
In addition to the woody herbs listed above, we added curry plant, myrtle, summer savory and a dwarf fig tree. In the early spring of 2022, our Mediterranean garden will be embellished with a colorful display of other drought-tolerant plants that thrive in the same conditions. Some additions will include Rock Purslane and a pleasing selection of succulents.
We hope that our reimagined Mediterranean landscape with its soft colors, gravel beds and informal, drought-tolerant plantings will hint of a visit to the countrysides of France, Greece or Italy. Perhaps you will be captivated by the intoxicating fragrance and earthy flavors characterized by these essential woody herbs of the Mediterranean region.
Linda Alexander, Dallas County Master Gardener Class of 2008
From our Herb Garden to you…
Thanksgiving Blessings!
With appreciation from The Raincatcher’s Team!
DALLAS GARDEN BUZZ 