Looking Ahead: Fort Bend County Master Gardener Shares Tips to Take Stock of Your Landscape This Winter
By Peggy d’Hemecourt, Advanced Master Gardener: Earth-Kind® Landscaping
The winter months are a good time to evaluate the landscape and make plans to solve problems, reduce maintenance, and improve beauty and function. The mostly mild winters here in Southeast Texas provide ideal conditions for being outdoors and comfortably tackling a landscape to-do list. For best results, invest time up front identifying what you’d most like to improve, do some research, then create a plan of action.
For example, lawns must be watered and maintained more often than other landscape plants. A solution might be to reduce the space dedicated to turfgrass by widening existing planting beds or adding planting beds around the perimeter of the yard. Treat the lawn as a landscape design element rather than filler between beds and hardscapes. Less turfgrass to mow and water, and more landscape plants for visual interest and function.
If you’d like to spend less time weeding beds, replenish the mulch layer this winter. A three-to-four-inch layer of organic mulch will discourage germination of weed seeds in bare areas of the planting bed. Planting ground covers in those bare areas will serve the same purpose.
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If perennial plants aren’t living up to your expectations or requiring too much maintenance, try to figure out why. Possibilities include too much or too little sunlight, too much or too little water, low soil fertility, or perhaps the plant is simply poorly adapted to this growing region.
Whether you’re wanting to add plants to existing or new planting beds or wanting to understand why a plant may be underperforming, the Earth-Kind® Plant Selector is a good place to start. It’s a searchable database of many common landscape plants that can be focused on the applicable Texas growing region. Select a plant and you’ll see a description, its habit or use, required exposure, flower color, blooming period, fruit characteristics, height, width, and the plant’s Earth-Kind® Index. The Index is a numerical rating on a scale of 1 - 10 of the plant’s heat tolerance, water requirements, soil requirements, pest tolerance and fertility requirements. A rating of 8 or above indicates the plant is well adapted to the growing region and is highly resource efficient, which translates into low maintenance. Visit aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/earthkind/plant-selector.
Dedicating some time to landscape evaluation and planning can really pay off. The Earth-Kind® Landscaping website is full of practical information for home gardeners who want to improve the odds of success and satisfaction from season to season. Visit aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/earthkind.
Source: Fort Bend County Master Gardeners
