Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Spring vegetables can be planted now from nursery starts. Begin your garden with broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, chard and onions. It pays to grow your own!

• Potatoes can be planted this month. Plant red, white, yellow and russet for a variety of uses and flavors.

• Plant bright and cheery primroses to brighten your flower beds and boxes.

• Pluots are a cross between plums and apricots. Their meaty fruit has a wonderful flavor. Bare root trees can be planted now.

• Prune wisteria trees and vines by cutting out unwanted long runners and removing old seed pods. Don’t damage flower buds that are clustered at the end of short branches.

Marvelous New Roses

Although the All-America Rose Selection (AARS) program has been discontinued, as of 2014, there are still many fine new rose introductions each year. Weeks Roses is one of the primary rose breeders today and each year they introduce several fine roses.

Happy Go Lucky™ is one of the new roses this year from Weeks Roses, and this rose has it all. The big, fragrant, pure yellow blossoms have all the charm of an old-fashioned English rose. Add to that excellent disease resistance and rich green foliage that sets off the 6-inch flowers, and you have one winning rose. This grandiflora will delight you with flowers all season long.

Miss Congeniality™ is another beautiful grandiflora rose. After 14 years of research, the experts at Weeks got this rose just right! Perfectly shaped buds cover this extremely disease-resistant plant all season. When they open, you’ll be treated to clusters of large, breathtaking blooms with strong pink edging. It is quick to rebloom and has a pleasing fragrance.

Pretty Lady Rose™ is one of the Downton Abbey® hybrid tea roses. As vibrant as her namesake, this rose has a high petal count that creates big, showy, ruffled blooms with a sweet fragrance. The rich, rose-pink flowers retain their large size even in summer’s heat. This rose is extremely disease-resistant and easy to care for. It is one of a new group of roses called ‘landscape roses’, which are exceptionally long-blooming and carefree.

The fiery redddish-orange, 3 to 4 inch blooms of Smokin’ Hot™ hybrid tea rose have a white reverse, a smoky purple overlay and a wonderful fragrance that hints of tea and spice. The young foliage emerges burgundy maturing to a deep lustrous green with hints of red burning at the edges. Produced singly on long stems, cut them for the vase any you’ll have an outstanding arrangement.

Tuscan Sun is a tidy floribunda growing 3-4 feet tall. Its clusters of deep apricot buds open into spectacular high-centered bronze blossoms that mature to lovely coppery pink flowers. The strong straight stems are 12”-14” long, and the spice-scented flowers last exceptionally well in the vase. This generous bloomer is a wonderful garden plant with a fine, well-branched habit and highly disease resistant foliage.

Roses need at least 6 hours of sun each day. Select a location that is free from tree roots and has good drainage. New roses should be watered twice a week, making sure the roots don’t dry out. Established roses only need deep watering once a week to moisten the soil 5 inches deep.

Fertilize new roses with a liquid fertilizer beginning when the growth is about six inches long and repeating every two or three weeks. For established plants, once every three months is sufficient, or use according to instructions on the package.

Like all living plants, roses may be attacked by insects and fungus diseases. Neem oil is a both a fungicide and an insecticide, and should be sprayed on susceptible roses every 10 days through wet spring weather. The newer, highly disease-resistant roses should only need spraying if you see a problem developing.

Take good care of your roses and they will reward you with abundant blooms all season long.

• Tulip tree magnolias are in glorious bloom. They can be planted now during the dormant season from balled & burlapped specimens.

• Cut back suckers on lilac bushes. Wait until they bloom to prune them, then you can bring the fragrant branches indoors.

• Deciduous Clematis vines can be cut back to about waist height, to encourage bushiness, more flowers and a nicer looking vine. Do this now before the new growth starts.

• Fragrant daphne is an early-blooming shrub that will delight you with its strongly scented blooms each spring. Plant it in well-drained soil.

• Onion plants can be set out now for early summer harvest.

It’s Bare Root Season

Cold nights and short days tell plants that it’s time to hibernate, which, to a plant, means to go into dormancy. Many trees, shrubs and perennials do that by dropping their leaves and storing reserves in their branches and roots through the winter. This is the dormant season and, in the nursery world, it’s the “bare root” season.

When deciduous plants go dormant, they can be dug up and transplanted with minimum shock or damage. In fact, the soil can be washed off their roots and they can be transported great distances in this “bare root” condition. This is the primary way that fruit trees, roses, grapevines, berry vines and many ornamental trees and shrubs are handled.

Because of the ease of harvesting, storing and shipping, this is a very economical way to bring plants to nurseries to sell. Nurseries like to pass along those prices to gardeners. So if you buy them while they are still dormant, before the nursery has to pot them up using soil and containers, the savings are passed on to you.

Trees, especially, are easier to plant when they are bare root. They are much lighter to handle, which is a real advantage if it’s a bit of a walk down to your orchard. You can also buy large shade trees much more economically. The good root structure and opportunity to plant the roots into native soil makes for a high success rate.

Don’t worry that these trees look like twigs at this time of the year, because they’ll soon leaf out and be growing vigorously this spring and summer.

Bare root season also offers the best selection of the year for these plants. Dozens of varieties of fruit trees are available, from favorites like ‘Fuji’ apple, ‘Bing’ cherry and ‘Santa Rosa’ plum to unusual ones like fruiting mulberries and Jujubes. You will find many different kinds of blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and kiwi vines, all anxious to be planted in your yard.

There are filberts, chestnuts and walnuts available, that all grow well in our area. And you’ll even find figs and pomegranates to try out in a nice warm spot in the yard.

For the vegetable garden, asparagus roots, rhubarb and artichokes can be planted now. There are many types of mouth-watering strawberries that arrive this time of year. Plant a large bed of them to have luscious berries all spring and summer.

Many ornamentals come in bare root. There are lilacs in a variety of colors and beautiful wisteria vines in pink, purple or white. Roses are now available in every color, shape and fragrance for early planting.

This is also a wonderful time to plant a shade tree. Look for maples, sycamores, redbuds, mulberry trees and lovely mimosas.

It’s an exciting time of the year for plant enthusiasts. But as the weather warms and plants begin to show new life, the bare root season comes rapidly to an end. So don’t wait too long to go shopping for bare root trees and shrubs.

• Asparagus, artichokes and rhubarb are perennial vegetables that are planted now during the dormant season.

• Blueberries make delicious fruit on attractive plants that you can use in the orchard or the landscape. Choose varieties now.

• Flowering dogwoods and tulip magnolias can be planted now during the dormant season from balled & burlapped specimens.

• Thin raspberry canes to 4-6 inches apart. Cut back remaining canes to 3 feet tall.

• Clean out bird houses. Remove old nesting material and scrub the inside with a solution of one part bleach to nine parts water.

Lovely Japanese Maples

Japanese maples are elegant in all seasons. With their small stature, tremendous variety, and four-season beauty, Japanese maples are a valuable plant in the landscape. Their delicate leaves, fine fall color, and artistic branch patterns make them beautiful throughout the year.

While most small trees are grown for their fleeting flowers, Japanese maples are grown for the beauty of their leaves, which come in a great variety of shapes and colors. They have been cultivated in Japanese gardens for centuries, and with the plant’s natural genetic variation, hundreds of cultivars have been selected and named.

Japanese maples are named Acer palmatum after the hand-like shape of their leaves, which are divided into five to seven sharply pointed lobes. On some trees, the lobes are further divided giving the leaves a lovely feathery or lacy appearance.

Leaf colors range from yellow-green to dark green, and from bright red to deep blood red. There are also trees with variegated leaves that are green outlined with white or gold. Red-leaved trees are very popular as they make a stunning accent in an otherwise green garden.

Japanese maples grow either as trees or shrubs. Tree types grow 15-20 feet tall. The original Japanese maple has light green leaves that turn bright oranges and reds in the fall. It is a fine garden tree.

‘Bloodgood’ is a vigorous lawn tree with deep, dark red leaves that hold their color well. It grows to 18 feet tall and wide, turns bright red in the fall, and is a dependable, sturdy tree. ‘Emperor I’ has deep purple-red new growth that holds its color through the summer. In the fall the foliage changes to crimson.

Many of the smaller mounding types have finely dissected leaves. Typically they grow to 6 feet in the landscape, or 4 feet in a container. ‘Garnet’ is fast-growing with a rich red-orange color that develops best with some sun. ‘Crimson Queen’ is an outstanding cultivar with a deep-red foliage color. Its deeply cut leaves hold their deep red color throughout the entire growing season.

‘Tamukeyama’ has a lovely weeping habit and deep purplish-red leaves in the summer. It does well in hot situations. ‘Viridis’ has green, finely dissected leaves that will burn in hot sun. The golden fall leaves are touched with crimson.

The unusual ‘Beni schichihenge’ has blue-green leaves with white edges overlaid with rosy-pink-orange. ‘Shishigashira’, commonly called the lion’s head maple, has dense tufts of crinkled deep green foliage on each branch, looking somewhat like the mane of a lion.

Japanese maples thrive in moist but well-drained, slightly acid soil in sun or part shade. The red-leaved cultivars need ample sunlight to develop their best color. Shade from hot sun and protection from drying winds will keep the leaves looking their best. Occasional watering, once a week in dry periods, and a light fertilizing in the spring will keep them healthy and beautiful.

Good under oaks, as background for ferns and azaleas, or as a small tree for patios and entryways, Japanese maples are beautiful landscape trees.