Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

Hang up Codling moth traps now to reduce the number of wormy apples in your harvest this year.

Enjoy the bright yellow colors of goldfinches outside your window by putting up thistle feeders for them.

Flowering dogwood trees are blooming now to help you choose a beautiful small tree for a focal point in your garden.

Turn in cover crops now and you will be ready to plant your summer garden in two or three weeks.

Check your rose bushes for frost damage and prune back burnt shoots into healthy green growth. Spray now with Neem Oil to prevent insect and disease problems.

The Cutting Garden
If you enjoy having fresh flowers in the house, it makes good sense to grow your own. With your own cutting garden, you can grow the flowers you love in the colors you want and make sure you have a selection of flowers for cutting most of the year.

Cut flowers are as easy to grow as vegetables when grown in blocks of the same kind. Choose plants that bloom for a long period and hold up well in the vase. Make sure you grow flowers that bloom at different seasons to have bouquets throughout the year.

In order to receive the maximum production of flowers, the garden should receive seven or eight hours of sun a day. The soil should be fertile with good drainage. There are also some flowers for cutting that can be grown in light shade, though flower production won’t be as great.

If you want to grow cut flowers in an ornamental garden, mix annuals and perennials with ornamental grasses, bulbs and roses. Grow at least three plants of each perennial and six of each annual to have enough flowers for cutting at one time.

Many of the best annual cut flowers are in the daisy family: asters, bachelor’s button, calendulas, cosmos, dahlias, marigolds, zinnias and sunflowers. Some contrasting flowers include gladiolus, dianthus, gayfeather, Victoria Blue salvia, snapdragons and stock.

Everlastings make great cut flowers for fresh or dried arrangements. Baby’s breath, globe amaranth, pink candle celosia, yarrow, statice and strawflowers are easy to air-dry without losing their color or form. Some, such as purple coneflowers and black-eyed Susans produce bold, bristly seedheads that are nice in dried arrangements.

Perennials from the daisy family include: aster, gaillardia, chrysanthemum, coreopsis, black-eyed Susans, Shasta daisy and painted daisy. Cup-and-saucer campanula, delphinium, lupine and penstemon offer tall spikes of bold flowers. Iris, poppies, peonies, daffodils, lilies, tulips and roses have individual flowers to uses as centerpieces of your arrangements.

Ornamental grasses add drama to flower arrangements. Use Northern Sea Oats, fountain grass, feather reed grass (Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’), or Japanese silver grass (Miscanthus sinensis) in both modern and country-style arrangements.

For long-lasting cut flowers, be sure to include carnations, Peruvian lilies (alstromerias), delphiniums, roses, lilies and sunflowers in your cutting garden. Their blooms will last in the vase for 6-14 days.

In areas that receive less than two hours of sun a day, you can grow astilbe, columbine, foxglove, and old-fashioned bleeding heart. If your flower bed is under deciduous trees, daffodils and tulips will flower nicely before the trees leaf out in the spring.

Whether you create a cutting garden, or add cut flowers to your ornamental flower beds, it’s easy to have lots of pretty cut flowers to enjoy indoors all season long.

• Plant potatoes! St. Patrick’s Day is a traditional day to plant potatoes, so the season is upon us now.

• Prune Hydrangeas now by removing old flower heads down to the first new leaves. Don’t prune stems which have no old flowers, and they will bloom first this summer.

• Mouth-watering strawberries should be planted now for delicious berries this summer. Plant them in a sunny, well-drained bed.

• Plant sweet peas and larkspur for bouquets of delightful blooms.

• Lily of the valley is a sweet, shade-loving perennial that can be planted now from “pips” available at the nursery.

Spring’s Leafy Greens

This mild weather is a perfect time to plant some of nature’s finest: the leafy edible greens of spring. With a penchant for growing in cool weather, these nourishing plants provide some of the garden’s earliest produce. The distinct flavors of leafy vegetables such as arugula, radicchio, Mizuna, and others can be an invigorating treat for the palate. Most spring greens are tender enough to use uncooked or very lightly steamed—all the better to showcase their clean, fresh flavors.

Arugula, or Rocket, is an easy-to-grow green known for its spicy, nutty taste. In just 20 days after sowing you can harvest the baby greens; for a full head wait another 10 to 15 days. Sow seeds as soon as the ground can be worked. Arugula can withstand a light frost and the flavor is mildest when the plant matures in cool weather.

There are several Asian greens that grow quickly in spring and are great for salads and stir fries. ‘Mizuna’ produces low-growing heads of white-stemmed, deeply serrated leaves. Its mildly sweet and spicy leaves add flavor and crunch to mixed salads ‘Tatsoi’ plants form a compact, thick rosette of leaves that are mild in flavor.

Radicchio is a mildly bitter tasting leafy vegetable. It is actually Italian Chicory, and the most popular variety looks like a small head of red lettuce. It is usually mixed into a variety of salads.

Mesclun, literally “mixture”, is the name given to a blend of lettuce, arugula, kale, Swiss chard, beet, and Asian greens. Depending on the blend, the mix may be mild or spicy. Sow seeds as soon as the ground can be worked, and enjoy the first harvest 30 days later, when the greens are only 4 inches tall. Sow successive crops every few weeks to have a continual supply.

Spinach is the classic cool-weather green, germinating in soils as cool as 35 degrees F. Once seedlings are 3 inches tall (20 to 30 days after seeding), thin the plants to space them 6 inches apart; plants mature 20 days later. Spinach comes in crinkled and smooth-leaved varieties.

Sow greens in rows or broadcast the seeds over the top of the raised bed. Cover the small seeds with potting soil or sand so they can germinate more easily. Cover the bed with a floating row cover to keep the soil warm, prevent insects from attacking and keep the bed moist. For all but mesclun greens, thin to the appropriate spacing.

Harvest leaves of your greens as soon as they’re at least 2 inches long. Pick individual leaves to create baby green salads or snip the young plants to the ground. Leave some plants, such as lettuce and spinach, to mature to full size for a larger harvest.

• Plant peas in well-drained soil for a spring crop. Protect from birds with bird netting or lightweight row cover.

• Last chance to spray peach and nectarine trees for peach leaf curl before the buds break open. Use copper sulfate powder for the best results.

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

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

• Potatoes are now in at local nurseries for early spring planting.

The Primrose Path

What happier choice of blossoms to start a spring garden than primroses? Even the Latin name comes from primus, meaning the first. This is a large family of plants having 400 to 500 species, mostly occurring in the Northern Hemisphere. Some are hardy garden species and others are only for heated greenhouses. Only a few are well adapted to the long, hot, dry summers of most parts of California.

The most popular are the polyantha hybrids, often called “English primroses”, which do very well in this area. Planted in a good location, they will come back year after year, larger and more floriferous each time! Flowers have just about the widest range of colors possible: white, yellow, gold, orange, pink, red, maroon, blue or purple. Planted as a mixture they are a dazzling display for three or four months of the year: January through April.

All primroses have leaves that stay close to the ground and are arranged in a circle and in the center is a flower stems that rise up above the leaves. The ‘Pacific Giants’ make an 8-inch tall stem with a cluster of flowers at the top of the stem. Individual flowers are an inch across and clusters contain a dozen or more. ‘Pageants’ have the same basal leaves with flowers on individual stems rising out from between the leaves to about 3 inches high.

Primroses are best appreciated right at your feet, where you can enjoy their perfection at close range. Plant them along a path for a colorful walkway. Suitable primrose companions for a moist, partly shaded spot include astilbes, ferns, hostas, Japanese iris, forget-me-nots, and Bethlehem sage.

Provide primroses with rich, woodsy soil enriched with compost, humus, peat moss and well-rotted manure. Choose a place in the shade, in a woodland garden, or in a spot that gets sun in the winter and shade from trees in the summer. Make sure you can water them throughout the summer. Under native oaks, it is better to plant them in flower boxes or barrels so that you don’t overwater the oak trees in the summer.

Cut off old flower stems as flowers fade and trim off tattered leaves. Plants will continue to produce new flowers through April. Give them a light feeding after bloom to strengthen the plants, and mulch them through the summer. When the clumps become thick and overgrown, divide them in May, every 3 or 4 years.

If you don’t want to use primroses as perennials, they also make lovely annual bedding plants. They are available during the winter and spring months and make a colorful display.