North Mississippi Gardening Tips
January/February 2008
ROSES
Continue to plant bare-root roses whenever the ground is not frozen. Before planting, trim long or broken roots and cut stems back to a healthy bud. Try new varieties, but keep old favorites as major plantings until new ones have proven themselves in your garden. Container-grown roses can be planted now through April.
Do not fertilize established roses until after you have pruned. Keep roses well mulched, but do not pile mulch against the crown or lower stems. Many problems like stem canker and botrytis occur when mulch covers the lower stems.
Roses are multi-functional landscape plants. They can be combined with other plants in the landscape to add beauty, fragrance, color, and function. Roses can be used as ground covers, hedges, screens, and, of course, climbers can be used to cover trellises, walls, arbors, etc.
Roses combine nicely with perennials such as catmint, chives, alliums, poppies, salvias and daylilies. Interplanting roses with perennials and other shrubs lessens the incidence of disease like blackspot as compared with plantings comprised of nothing but roses. Planting a single rose in a flower garden can act as an anchor. Roses can also stand alone as a specimen plant and dress up a foundation planting as well. Growing roses in containers is a nice way to have roses if your garden space is small. In other words, there is a place for the queen of flowers and our national flower in everyone’s garden!
FLOWERS
One of the most common harbingers of spring is the bright, cheery daffodil. Nothing brightens up the winter home more than a bouquet of buttercup blossoms. Although these make great cut flowers, they differ from cut flowers when it comes to conditioning. To get the longest vase life, follow these recommendations. Cut the blossoms very early in the morning by gently pulling the entire flower stem from the base. Gently twist as you pull and it should snap off at the ground level or just below. The end of the stem should be white and pith filled.
For single flowered blossoms pick when the flower bud is partially open revealing color and the neck is bent at close to a 90-degree angle to the stem. For multi-flowered stems pick when at least one of the bunch is fully open.
Cut the white, pith filled base while holding the stem underwater to prevent stem-clogging bubbles forming which could prevent water uptake. Put the stems in warm water that has ½ teaspoon/quart of household bleach added. Place the container with the cut daffodils in a cool, dark area for twelve hours or overnight.
FRUITS AND NUTS
Area nurseries and farm supply stores should be receiving their fruit trees now. Growing and harvesting your own tree-ripened fruit can be a very rewarding or a very disappointing experience. To get the best quality apples or peaches you should follow a yearly schedule of pruning, spraying, fertilizing and thinning of fruit. You also should select your fruit trees based on where you live in Mississippi. Check with local nurserymen to see what they recommend and also check with your County Extension office for a publication P0966, Fruit and Nut Recommendations for Mississippi, that has information on recommended fruit tree varieties for Mississippi.
Choose a site for your trees that is well drained. Planting on a slope would help take care of that problem and planting on a northern slope would be even better. Since northern slopes take longer to warm up in spring, this would help to delay spring bloom; thereby lessening the chance of losing your blooms to an early spring freeze--an all too frequent occurrence.
You can purchase fruit trees, bareroot, in plastic sacks or in pots. Research has shown potted fruit trees have a much higher survival rate than the others, but, of course, the cost is higher.
Pruning, fertilizing and spray schedules are chores that can get complicated if you don't have some guidance. The county Extension office has free publications and information sheets that take the mystery out of all these procedures.
VEGETABLES
As you begin to plan and plant your vegetable garden consider using several different approaches to have continuous production and the best use of the garden space. There are three intensive management approaches you can take. The first would be interplanting or intercropping. This is a technique used by our farming ancestors and continued today. Combine slow-growing or early-maturing crops with a fast-growing or late-maturing crop. Examples would be planting pole beans or pumpkins in corn, or planting carrots with leaf lettuces or radishes. Another technique would be successive planting. This is when a crop is grown, harvested, removed, and another planted in its place. Try to avoid planting vegetables in the same family in the same place right after one another. Examples would be following peas with okra, or planting cucumbers after spinach. Planting a spring, summer and fall garden is another form of succession planting. Staggering the planting times of one type of crop to extend the harvest season over a long period of time is another way to manage vegetable production. This prevents the all to common problem of everything in the garden being ready for harvest at once. This reminds me of what an aunt of mine said once when I asked her how her muskmelon crop was doing. She said, “Good! They all ripened at once and all rotted at once!”
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.