Weekly Gardening Tips - January

Many people use salt to melt the ice on their walks and driveways. This can do considerable damage to nearby shrubs. It would be better to use sawdust or sand on your walks and driveways to ensure safe footing.

Avoid walking on dormant lawn, dry and frozen grass can be damaged or killed when the crown is crushed or broken.

Birds and other small animals have a hard time finding food when there is snow on the ground. For a few pennies, you can feed a lot of birds. A bird feeder works great to keep the food up off the ground and the birds out of harms way from cats. If you don’t have a feeder lay some cardboard or a piece of plywood on the snow.

Here in Northern California, some of my bulbs think it’s spring already, the Paper Whites have begun blooming.

January is a good month to do your dormant fruit tree spraying. A dormant oil applied now will help to control insect infestations such as scale or aphids. You can spray your peaches to prevent peach leaf curl. Timing is everything, a fungicide needs three applications three weeks apart before the peach buds open.

Now is a good time to get started on pruning your deciduous shrubs and fruit trees. Prune above the collar at the base of the branch. The enlarged base helps to heal the wounds by producing a healing hormone. When you are pruning large limbs, start with the undercut and finish by cutting the top of the limb. This will keep the limb from splitting and doing damage to the main branch. You should wait until after the bloom to prune spring blooming shrubs.

Springtime will be here soon, if you haven’t been working repairing or replacing your tools, this is a reminder, spring will be here before you know it. I am looking at the Mantis tiller for my garden. I think it will help to break up my clay soil and grind my weeds into the soil before they go to seed.

Your houseplants have been sitting for several months collecting dust. This dust will clog pores in the leaves. Take a damp rag and wipe off large leaves. Spray the leaves of your plants with a small hands sprayer filled with water. Take the plant and put it in the shower and spray with low pressure. This is another method to wash dirt off the leaves.

As you read through your garden catalogs looking for vegetables that you had success with and would like to grow this year, consider ordering a few new varieties. Order your seeds now while the seed companies have plenty of stock.

By adding new varieties of vegetables to your garden list that are more disease or insect resistant, you can help to prevent strains of super bugs. Super bugs is a term for insects and diseases that mutate and grow resistant to normal chemical control.

Winter is a great time to plant in moderate zones. Just make sure your garden is not sopping wet or saturated. If you can work the ground use this time to plant or transplant deciduous trees and shrubs.

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