It is planting and mulching season both north and south of the Equator. Our friends in Australia and South Africa are heading into warmer weather and Spring gardening.
Meanwhile those of us in the arid U.S. Southwest are preparing our gardens for Fall and Winter now that the daytime air temperatures have cooled down. And in both parts of the globe, plants are waking up from a months-long dormancy and they are hungry!
Of course, you could just toss some fertilizer here and there around your garden and call that “Plant Breakfast”. That, however is the equivalent of giving your children spoonfuls of sugar for breakfast.
Instead, to give your plants the long-lasting, healthy nutrition they need for strong growth and good root development here is what to do:
Loosen the soil around shrubs and trees–but do it very carefully. You do not want to damage the plant roots. I saw this handy tool for loosening soil at Orchard Supply (which is going out of business.) It looks as if it breaks up the earth much deeper than one of those rolling garden gadgets. And the deeper the soil is opened up the deeper the irrigation water and nutrients will go.
As you do this, you may want to add in garden topsoil to the native soil in your planting beds–mixing it all together. Read the label to see if the “Top Soil” has been enriched with fertilizer.
Check with the best independently owned plant nursery in your area for the fertilizer that is right for soil conditions in your area and the kinds of plants you have in your garden. Usually the people at independent nurseries are more knowledgeable about local soil problems than folks at the big box garden centers.
While I am not a big fan of dumping chemicals into gardens, certain conditions require specialized treatment. See this post about iron deficiencies and alkaline soil for one example. And this post about not adding polymers to your flower beds.
You may even want to test your soil with an inexpensive pH testing kit which you can buy online or at a local garden center before you decide which type of fertilizer or other soil additive is best for your garden.
For whatever it is worth I have been hearing very good things about aged manures and even fish manures. I can’t guarantee that they are better than other types of fertilizers, however, and they may be more expensive. Manures can also be filled with weed seeds unless they have been sterilized.
Okay. You have done the best you can to get the soil prepped so the next step is to add heaps of organic mulch. Some bagged mulch has the fine texture of good garden soil and will mix in nicely. Other mulch, like wood chips, is coarser.
If your budget allows it, I would suggest that you use both with the coarse mulch on top to protect the fine mulch and/or soil beneath from blowing away in the Fall winds. The coarse mulch releases its nutrients much more slowly providing food for your plants for a longer period of time. The fine mulch often has extra fertilizer in it to give plants a quick boost. Be careful that you don’t end up with too much fertilizer that would force plants to grow and bloom when they ordinarily would not want to. During winter time, plant growth should be in the roots to get ready for an above-ground growth spurt in Spring.
Mother Nature plants in Fall and so should you, so I will write about best practices for Fall planting in the next post.
Full Disclosure: I went to Orchard Supply to take photos of bags of garden mulch and ended up taking all the photos in this post at the store. “Thank You, OSH!” They are going out of business and there are good bargains.
CLIMATE CHANGE. One reason there have rarely been hurricanes as far north as Southern California is because of the cooler ocean current off the California coast. Hurricanes need ocean water with a temperature of 80°+ to keep their power.
Well, the ocean temperature off the So. California coast was 78° a month ago–ten degrees above normal–which appears to be warm enough. Hurricane Rosa is on her way across upper Baja, then onto Yuma AZ and points north and will be bringing flooding monsoon-type rains to the Los Angeles and Las Vegas areas. While rain is desirable for all of us, downpours can be dangerous. Read more about saving rain in your garden.
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