The weather this week is making us want to get outside and garden!! We’re stocking up on veggies, Texas native plants, trees, and lots of flowers and blooming perennials as we head into Spring! Here’s our top 7 gardening tasks to focus on this month to kickstart an amazing season.
1. Be Ready for Cool Weather and Start Planting!
Keep your eye on the forecast for cold snaps, but don’t delay your planting projects. Cool season flowers, trees, shrubs, veggies, and more need to be planted this month to take advantage of cool weather and get a head start on root growth. If we do get another freeze, new plants are easy to cover!
2. Start Your Veggies!
It’s time to start veggie favs like tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, beans, lettuces/greens, & more! Prep those beds with Nature’s Blend compost and get going. If you’re short on space, use containers! Stop by and we’ll help you plan your veggie garden and get you everything you’ll need for a bountiful harvest.
3. Come Learn All About Growing Tomatoes with DeAnna This Saturday at 10!
Tomatoes need to be planted early this month. So….join us this Saturday, 2/3 at 10am for our garden talk, Tomato Time with DeAnna Baumgartner, Gill’s manager and tomato expert! DeAnna will share valuable tips for growing all kinds of tomatoes in the ground and in containers or raised veggie beds. This talk is great for beginners and experienced tomato growers alike. Bring your questions and share your plant knowledge as we hang out and talk about everything tomatoes. We’ll hold the talk outside if the weather’s nice, or inside the greenhouse if not. One attendee will win a $100 Gill’s gift card, and we’ll do some other giveaways too!
4. Keep Feeding Veggies & Flowers
Blooming plants need food! Veggies are especially heavy feeders – they need to be able to sustain blooming and producing fruit. We recommend mixing in a little Bio-Tone Starter when you plant, which contains mycorrhizal fungi that promotes root growth. Then feed with a good organic, granular plant food like Plant-Tone or Medina Growin Green once a month, and supplement with liquid organic Hasta Gro in between. An easy way to remember this is to set an alarm or calendar event for granular feeding on the 1st of the month, then Hasta Gro on the 15th. These will add nutrients to your plants and keep your soil alive and healthy too.
5. Mid February = Time to Prune!
February is the time to get plants cut back to make way for big spring growth! Since we just had a freeze, we recommend waiting another week or so until mid-February. Most perennials like Lantana, Turk’s Cap, and Salvias need a good pruning back to about 4-8″ – don’t be shy! For any plants with woody stems/branches (like Esperanza and Hibiscus) that look dead or damaged, do the scratch test before pruning. Start up high and scratch with your fingernail, a dime, or the back side of a knife. Don’t scratch too deep. If you see the bright green cambium layer (like the photo), that means it’s still alive! If you see brown/gray when you scratch, keep working your way down the plant until you see green. That will tell you where to cut. As always, contact Gill’s if you’re not sure or have questions about whether or how to prune specific plants.
6. Keep Watch for Winter Insects
Scale is a variety of hard bodied sucking insects that range in appearance from white oyster shells to brown boogers stuck to the leaves of plants. Some of their favorites are Burford Holly, Bird of Paradise, Flax Lily, & Irises. They are easily controlled with a spray of organic All Seasons Oil Spray, but it must be done now. The oil spray literally coats and suffocates the the eggs that are waiting for spring to hatch. It’s also good for treating indoor plants that may have scale or spider mites.
7. Got Weeds?
Right now, hand pulling the thistle while the ground is moist and keeping the clover mowed before it flowers are the best options to control 2 of our most common weeds. Weed killer sprays (like Weed B Gon) work with warm weather and sunshine with no rain or heavy night fog. We need to wait to spray until temperatures are consistently between 75-80 degrees. Be patient and wait a few more weeks since you should only spray one time or you risk damaging your lawn.
Check out our February Garden Guide for more tips!
-James
Time to fertilize your lawn, trees & shrubs! Hopefully by the time you get this, the sunshine will have warmed and dried the soil enough to fertilize. Use Gill Lawn and Garden for all your trees, shrubs, vines and groun
dcovers. Also feeds the vegetable garden. Covers 6000 sq. ft. per bag.
For weed control in your lawn, use Weed B Gon for St. Augustine. We have a new formulation that is safe to use on Floratam St. Augustine Grass. Treats up to 2500 sq. ft. and comes in a ready to spray hose-end bottle. Image will kill some broadleaf weeds (dollarweed) as well as a few grassy weeds (grassburrs) without hurting your St. Augustine. Another new product we have is Topshot. It also kills all broadleaf weeds in the lawn and comes in a package with 2 ampules which cover 5000 sq. ft. Simply add 1 ampule with water in either a pump sprayer or Dial n Spray to cover 2500 sq. ft.. For best results apply weed killers when weather is warm (not hot) and sunny for 3-4 days. Do not use in flowerbeds for weed control (except Image), only as a lawn application.
your clothes will always smell great!
I’ve always known Cherry Green is an avid gardener. Year round, no matter how hot or cold it is, she remains a gardener. Whenever I see her about town, she asks if we have this or that, and most of the time it’s not your ordinary ligustrum or Asian jasmine. A few weeks ago, she was in the store looking for pink gaura, one of my favorites, but again, not a typical Corpus Christi landscape plant. In conversation, I asked if I could come tour her garden. What a treat!
Interestingly, when she acquires a new plant, she enters it in her data base by common and scientific name. In addition, she photographs her succulents since sometimes they are difficult to differentiate. I also think that could be a great way to record plant performance, bloom cycles, etc… 
There are crape myrtles, a mountain laurel and a grapefruit, specimen plumeria, durantas, firecracker plant, irises, altheas, pride of Barbados, porter weed, night blooming jasmine, Indian carnation, milkweed, a beautiful specimen white bird of paradise, beautiful blooming gomphrena and a nice assortment of vines on their back and side fence. Again, they have a great collection of succulents in an interesting collection of containers. She jokes that her lawn is disappearing as her garden beds get larger. 
are grateful to have her in the neighborhood (anyone would with such a beautiful landscape), as I am to have her as a friend and a member of our gardening community. Thank you Cherry!
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.
