Newsletter Spring - Hot Gardens

Hot Gardens Newsletter: Spring

Feed your plants now

Wake up and eat. As the days become longer and the overnight low temperatures rise, your plants are beginning to come out of winter dormancy. And they are hungry! Over the winter plants have grown slowly underground, spreading their roots ever further in search of new food sources. Now they are ready to make an upward push — producing new branches, new leaves, and most important of all, new flowers which will lead to seeds. Creating seeds for reproduction is what plants aim to do. It is their reason for being.

Yummy Mulch. You can help your plants by add a good mulch–full of organic materials–around trees and shrubs and in flower beds. Then add a balanced fertilizer. In many desert gardens you may have to add sulfur, iron or other minerals to allow your plants to grow and produce flowers and seeds. Ask for recommendations from your local nursery for the correct fertilizer for your specific soil conditions. Don’t rely on fertilizer ads you’ve seen advertised on TV. They are unlikely to be suitable for desert alkaline soils.

Why Mulch Twice a Year?

Much of the soil in the desert Southwest is alkaline. Not many plants grow well in alkaline soil. So, as every good desert gardener knows, when you establish a new garden the first thing to do is improve the soil with good organic mulch.

David Austin rose sir edward elgar — If you plan to grow roses as beautiful as this David Austin rose, ‘Sir Edward Elgar’, you absolutely must enrich the soil around the bush once or twice a year. Plus add fertilizer regularly. Roses are hungry plants!

What happens after your install the plants in the nutritious soil you have created is this: the plants gobble up all the nutrition in the soil within a few months. Surprisingly quickly, the soil reverts to its alkaline state.

Some plants may continue to survive–after a fashion–particularly if you dose them with fertilizer. But adding more and more fertilizer is like treating the symptoms without getting to the root cause. By renewing the mulch in Spring and Fall will do much more to maintain a healthy growing environment for the plants in your desert garden.