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North Mississippi Gardening Tips
April, 2006

FLOWERS

Garden centers and nurseries are packed full of a wide assortment of bedding plants right now. Selection and quality are the best in spring, so get shopping. But hold your horses just one minute and answer this question before you charge down to the garden center. Are you one of those who lose your self-control at the sight of scads of eye-popping perfect plants? If the answer is yes, slap yourself hard on both cheeks before you get out of the car at your favorite garden center or nursery. That might settle you down a bit and help you exercise some judgement before you come home with a trunk full of clashing flower colors and peculiar plants that you spend the next week trying to fit into your landscape.

Every gardener spends their life trying to improve their soil—because every gardener knows good soil is the foundation from which all the beauty and bounty of plants arises. Do you have good soil? If you don’t, now is the time to do something about it before you fill all those beds with those plants you feverishly purchased this spring.

One old farmer’s test for determining the difference between good and bad soil is this: if you can walk on the soil after a good rain and it sticks to your “galoshers,” you need to fix it. How? First, know that the reason it sticks to your boots is because of the clay content. If you have this problem the easiest solution is to add organic matter. Compost, well-rotted sawdust and peat moss are just a few examples. Add a four to six inch layer of organic matter to the existing soil and till in thoroughly. After the addition of organic matter is a good time to do a soil test because the organic matter can alter the pH. Contact your county Extension office for information and assistance on soil testing. After you have added the organic matter and any amendments or nutrients that the soil test recommended, you are ready to plant.

VEGETABLES

You are anxious to get those warm-season vegetable seeds in the ground. But, until the ground warms to above 60º F, most warm season vegetables including beans, squash and corn will not germinate reliably. If you’re planting watermelon, cantaloupe or okra the soil temperature should be at least 75º for good germination. By the middle of this month the ground should be sufficiently warm for good germination of most warm season vegetables. How do you know what the temperature of the soil is? You could try what gardeners in ancient times did to determine the soil’s warmth and readiness for planting. It was standard practice to remove one’s trousers and sit on the ground before seeding to determine whether the soil was warm enough. If the flesh found it discomforting, it was too early to sow. I would suggest that if you do this, you do it discretely and demurely. Or otherwise, at the best, your neighbors will think you mad as a hatter, and at the worst will call the law.

GROUND COVERS AND LAWNS

If you haven’t fertilized your cool season tall fescue lawn do it early this month. We are fortunate in north Mississippi that we can grow this cool season grass as a permanent shade turf unlike our brethren further south. The turf type tall fescues like Rebel, Mustang and Hound Dog, are good selections for us. My shady lawn of Rebel fescue has been known to stay green year round when the winters were mild and I didn’t forget to water during July and August.

There are some things in life you cannot do no matter how hard you try. You can’t talk sense into your teenager. You can’t kiss your own elbow and you can’t grow grass in heavy shade under trees. What you can grow is moss. If you have it already encourage more of it. It’s a lovely green practically year round. It never needs mowing. It makes a nice bed on those balmy, warm spring days when you want to lie on your back with your little one and gaze at the puffy clouds moving across the sky. If moss doesn’t suit you, here are some good ground covers for shade: English ivy, monkeygrass, mondo grass, periwinkle (Vinca minor) and hosta. This month is a good time to plant these ground covers in those shady areas.

TREES AND SHRUBS

Azaleas are strutting their stuff this month. These plants when in flower are the glory of the Southern garden. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you have to have one of every color. There’s a difference between having mass of color in the landscape and having mess of color that makes you nauseated or dizzy. If you insist on having competing bloom colors separate them with white-blooming varieties and plant in mass. Shop for new plants now when they are in flower, so you can match the colors to what you already have. Prune azaleas after flowering, but only if really necessary.

Fertilize spring-flowering trees like dogwood, redbud, ornamental cherry, crabapple and others as the petals fall. Use one pound of 5-10-15 fertilizer per inch circumference of the tree measured three feet above the ground.

Many shrubs will be finishing up their bloom this month. This is the time to encourage new growth by fertilizing. Summer flowering shrubs can also be fertilized now. A general fertilizer recommendation for shrubs is one-half pound of 13-13-13 per three feet of the shrub’s height.

Lelia Scott Kelly, Ph.D., writes North Mississippi Gardening Tips monthly and is a Horticulture Specialist with the Mississippi State University Extension Service. Her office is in the North Mississippi Research & Extension Center, Verona.