Jesse Jenkins

Last week we talked about preparing the vegetable garden by pulling the leftover plants and weeds and turning in plenty of new compost. Next we need to think about what we are going to plant this fall and where in the garden we are going to plant it. Each season is a challenge to grow everything you want to with limited space. And then there’s that term crop rotation. Do I really have to? I like my tomatoes at that end of the garden.

Simply put, crop rotation is a systematic method of deciding what to plant where in your garden from one season to the next, based on plant groups. Moving plants to a new location each season improves your garden in two ways. First, it helps keep your soil healthy and fertile. Planting the same thing in the same place season after season drains the nutrients from the soil that the plant needs in order to thrive and produce big harvests. Second, rotating plant families helps manage soil-borne diseases like verticillium wilt, and soil-dwelling insects like corn rootworms or root knot nematodes. These types of diseases and pests prefer certain kinds of plants, and the longer the plants stay in the same soil, the better the chance that these enemies will show up and cause trouble.

Here are four simple families of plants to group and rotate each season:

The Tomato Family

The tomato family includes tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and potatoes. These are heavy feeders and are best planted in enriched soil. Tomato family members often are also affected by the same diseases. Never follow tomatoes after potatoes because deadly late blight can overwinter in potatoes that might have been missed and remain in the soil.

The Bean Family

These crops enrich the soil by adding a little nitrogen. This group includes green beans, green peas, and southern peas. A good gardening practice is to follow beans or peas with leafy greens such as cabbage or kale which love the nitrogen left behind by their predecessors.

The Squash Family

Squash family members are heavy feeders that grow best in rich soil also. They include summer and winter squash, pumpkins, gourds, cucumbers, and melons (including cantaloupe and watermelon).

The Cabbage Family

These leafy greens thrive on nitrogen-rich soil. Plant them where a member of the bean family has grown before. Members include cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collards, and turnip greens.

Crop rotation is not as complicated as it sounds, especially if you take the time to sketch a garden plan and refer to the list of families. The benefits are definitely worth the effort.

-DeAnna

You had beautiful roses in the spring, but now they’re looking like they might croak. Don’t worry! This is totally normal. Large flowering plants like roses or hibiscus can get stressed from this summer heat, so they might stop blooming, or even stop growing. Continue watering them through this heat spell, and when the temperatures drop in the fall your roses should flush back out. Using organic fertilizers help build up your soil conditions to keep your roses healthy! We recommend Rose Glo or Medina Hasta Gro.

-Marta

Lily & Heath, Airline’s 2 kitty cats! If you have spent any time at our Airline store, you are sure to have spied 2 tabby cats sauntering around meeting and greeting our patrons. Heath, a super-sized lean tabby cat can be found lounging at the checkout, curled up on a mat, in a pot,
sprawled in a birdbath, or any place he decides to call “his” for the day. Lily, his mom, makes her domain an office chair in our accounting office so she can keep a watchful eye over the day to day operations of our company. They will search out anyone, throw themselves down by their feet and demand some long petting and strokes of love and food. What many of you don’t know is Lily began her life as a wild stray living in the outback of our nursery.

Our Airline store is still on the edge of town with a lot of country around us. So it was no surprise when we saw another poor pregnant scrawny cat living in the surrounding brush. What did surprise us was when she decided that living as a single, soon to be mom, was too much. She began hanging out in the nursery and well, of course, someone went and bought food. Trusting us more and more, she began coming around for food and a few pets. One day she showed up much skinnier. We knew she’d had her kittens; we just couldn’t find them! A fews weeks later we heard the meows of kittens in our warehouse. Diane, our animal rescue guru, was on the spot hunting them down, looking through our dusty loft. Now, although Lily had gotten used to us, her kittens were wild. It took Diane wearing leather welding gloves to capture them. It did not take long for them to get used to us, and once they came of age, they all went to good homes with some of you… all except one sweet male kitten we fondly named Heath. His namesake is a wonderful young man who worked here many years, helping us with everything from carry-outs to tree plantings to garden center sales to computer programming. Heath was leaving us to pursue his career.

Their first year living as our nursery cats was fun and a little nail biting. As cats do they would leave us “presents” on our door step of fresh kills they had made. Sometimes they would wander off and we worried they had gotten hurt or became a meal for coyotes. One time Heath, the cat, was missing all day. We feared the worst, when one of our landscape crews, working out of town, called and said they saw this cat that looked just like Heath. To our amazement, it was. He had crawled onto the trailer and took a ride all the way to Skidmore! Soon after, Lily and Heath took a trip to the vet for all their shots and were spayed and neutered.

That was back in 2010. Nowadays, Lily and Heath spend their time in the nursery, working to keep vermin and other pests under control. But most of all they love living here and with all of us; Gills has truly become their kingdom!

-Debbie

Of the many great reasons to live in South Texas, one of my favorites is we get to enjoy the tropical splendor of colorful plants from temperate regions of the world.

Croton plants are recognized by their colorful fall colored foliage. Reds, yellows, and oranges paint their leaves that can be large, small, and even curly! I have always grown crotons outside in pots on my patio. They add those great colors of fall that are hard to come by this far south. They enjoy the morning sun and like some shade from the hot afternoons. Keeping them in pots allows me to move them in if it gets a little too cold in the winter. It’s a perfect time to add crotons to your patio, they love the warm summer and cool fall season! Added bonus….they’re on sale this week! See you soon.

-Debbie

The asps are out! It’s been years since we’ve had a big asp outbreak. These stinging hump back caterpillars love oak trees, yaupons hollies, burford hollies, hawthorns, altheas, and hibiscus. I saw a fresh hatching no bigger than a pea on some hollies the other day. Take a close look at your plants and see if you find any skeletonized leaves. Spray thoroughly on the tops and bottoms of the leaves with Spinosad, or Liquid Sevin as a contact kill. Thuricide can also be used, but the caterpillar has to ingest the leaves to be killed and that takes a couple of days.

Leafcutter bees are also a problem now. These bees are generally passive and not very aggressive. However they can sting and will do so if handled or aggravated. You usually never see the bee, but you do see the damage left behind. They cut perfect semi-circles out of the leaves of soft tissued plants such as crape myrtles, hibiscus, plumbago and roses. We first noticed the damage on our kapok trees. They take the leaves and roll them into perfect tubes to block their nest openings. No treatment is necessary since the nesting period of the female is usually just a couple of weeks. The scalloping of the leaves will not kill your plants, it just leaves them unsightly to some. These bees are great pollinators, so I say, “let them do their thing”.

-DeAnna

Some of you remember Stuart as an infant in his baby carrier, plopped on the sales counter at our Airline store while I ran the cash register. Some of you remember his working in your garden or helping you select your Christmas tree or coming to your home with James on a house call. We laugh out loud when we recall Stuart, around 10 at the time, diagnosing chinch bugs in a customer’s yard. He clearly was paying attention to his dad. And then there was the time, at about the same age, when he suggested that we start staying open 24 hours a day, allowing inventory to be stocked while customers were asleep! We haven’t implemented his system, but we recognize it has merit. As a young boy, Stuart travelled with us on tours of plant growers around Texas. James, Stuart and I would jump in the grower’s vehicle and drive the fields, trying to find the best plants for our garden center. James and I devised a system for grading plants, A+ being the best to F being the worst, all recorded on paper, but never revealed to our salesperson. On one of these trips, Stuart announced to the group that he thought the dwarf pittosporum was a C grade. We covered up his comment as best we could, but laughed later. Bottom line, Stuart lived Gill Landscape Nursery from a very early age.

Stuart has always been adventurous. I’m embarrassed to say friends would report seeing him on his bike, all over Corpus Christi. He loved exploring. He loved seeing other neighborhoods. He loved seeing the way others lived. His earliest out-of-town adventures included fishing with his brother Trevor at his uncle Lanny’s “Baja Laguna”, kayaking on Texas rivers, exploring around my parents’ cabin in Colorado, camping with his dad, brother and grandmother on Matagorda Island, exploring South Texas brush in Ingleside, and many, many trips to the beach with his dad. As he got older, he worked to travel, often alone. Between school and jobs he travelled to countries in Europe, Central and South America. On one of his surf trips with his dad to Ecuador, he met two women from Seattle. After getting to know Stuart, they recommended he move to Seattle. They thought he would like it. He had finished his degree at the University of Texas and was working in Napa, California.

Stuart packed his bags and moved to Seattle. He started working in the landscape industry, and then moved into carpentry. Stuart has always had a great appreciation for fine craftsmanship. He found good people to work with, he started from the bottom learning the trade, and eventually began purchasing his own tools, the best he could find. He now works with Ambrose Construction, managing beautiful residential remodels and additions.

Stuart met Anne in February of 2013. She hadn’t been in Seattle long. They found they had a lot in common. They both love good food and literature; they both love the outdoors and adventure. Plus she’s very pretty with beautiful blue eyes. Anne also has travelled to many foreign destinations with her parents and lived in Indonesia. Anne works in a public relations firm, representing independent restaurants in Seattle. She is a skier, runner & yoga instructor. She is kind, gentle and smart, she loves Stuart, and she’s about to become our daughter-in-law!

So…that’s an update on our son, Stuart. You know, the day he was born, James’ and my lives changed forever. He has truly been a joy for us, someone who is always on our minds, someone with whom we look forward to spending time with. Even though Stuart doesn’t live in Corpus Christi anymore, he is still a part of Gill’s. He knows and loves our Gill family. He continues to help us think through work challenges. He is always there to celebrate our successes.

One more thing… Anne and Stuart are doing a bike tour of Indonesia for their honeymoon. Happy, Happy!

-Sally

Kathy Hubner, one of our landscape designers, went on a tour of Irish gardens in July with the Association of Professional Landscape Designers. These photos were taken at the lake at Castletown Cox in the county of Kilkenny.

“In July I had the good fortune to escape the summer heat and tour Irish Gardens.

I knew the landscape would be lush and green. It was.

I knew it might rain. I was prepared.

I never dreamed the combination would make me feel like I’d stepped into a Monet painting!”

We’ve talked about weeding and prepping the soil. You should also have a plan on where to plant since we discussed crop rotation. So now the fun begins. Time to get those tomatoes and peppers in the ground or into pots.

Add Bio-Tone to the soil when planting. It helps promote strong, healthy plants with larger root systems, promotes bigger blooms, and reduces transplant loss. It will make your plants blast off. I was amazed how my plants responded last year.

Then, in 3-4 weeks, begin feeding monthly with Espoma Plant tone to maintain healthy plants throughout the season. It contains feather meal, poultry manure, bone meal and greensand. It also has beneficial bacillus to help fight fungus and disease in your plants. Since plant roots are used for water and nutrient uptake, use Mycorrhizal fungi to improve root growth, soil structure and plant establishment. How can you go wrong?

These few simple steps will get you on your way to having healthy, happy plants. So don’t wait too long to get the garden started. You will be rewarded with those first tasty tomatoes for Thanksgiving dinner.

And just remember, the longer you wait to plant, the bigger the plant you will need to buy. We have awesome 4.5 inch and 1 gal. tomatoes and peppers ready to go.

-DeAnna

Jesse Jenkins

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