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This week, a look ahead at this winter’s weather, and recommendations to improve how your landscape rides out the season. This week’s answers aren’t for the questions we’re hearing right now – they’re to answer the questions people will be asking in January and February about how to perk their plants up when they could have prevented issues with a few precautions.
- Start to taper back summer watering schedules. Our late heat waves notwithstanding, plants are starting to drink less now as days shorten and nights cool. Don’t shut off your sprinklers entirely but start cutting back your sprinklers from their summer settings. During our colder months, shut off automatic systems and simply run them on manual cycles the day before a hard freeze, or every couple of weeks/as needed if we’ve had no rain worth mentioning.
- It’s time to mulch again. Go through your flowerbeds and check to see if your protective mulch layer that’s done good service this summer keeping your soil moist is still thick enough to prevent winter weeds and moderate the chill of a severe winter storm. You’re looking for a mulch layer 1 1/2″- 2″ deep for the best results. Add more mulch if necessary to bring your beds up to this thickness around sensitive plants at least, and ideally across your entire landscape. Any shredded wood mulch is fine for this purpose.
- Pick up frost cloth for winter flowers and sensitive plants now, not the day before a freeze! We do our best to keep plenty of frost cloth handy to help our customers make it through cold weather, but inevitably, there will be a hard freeze that starts a huge run on this material and in a truly bad weather event, supplies run out across the entire Metroplex! It happens most years, so get ahead of things this time. You don’t need enough to make it through the fall of civilization – just make sure you have enough to cover your most sensitive plants as needed. Pansies, violas, and winter cabbages will usually tolerate a brutal freeze uncovered, but they’re not unscathed – your pansies can go flat for weeks and at times do not look perky again until temperatures warm in February and March. The modest protection of a proper frost cloth makes all the difference in the world if you want pretty flowers most of the winter.