Mild winter makes cleaning, pruning, planting possible
In other climates, gardeners take this time to plan and dream. Here, our mild winters make for year-round gardening. This is our best time to clean, plant, prune, and to plan for spring.
Prepare for weather
Will it rain or will dry winds blow?
December weather can be warm enough for lying on the beach, or wet enough for wearing galoshes. This kind of weather makes Southern California gardening so different from gardening elsewhere.
Make sure your irrigation controller is on the reduced winter schedule. In the cooler, wetter, shorter days, plants need only infrequent irrigation, especially when it rains.
Be sure to run your irrigation system the day before Santa Ana winds are expected. Other than that, water if it hasn’t rained for a while,
AND if when you poke your finger into the soil, its dry to the second knuckle.
Clean rain gutters. Gutters filled with leaves and debris overflow with rainwater, so it flows over the edges and beats up the plants below. Take the time to clean the gutters. You can compost the gunk that comes out, or spread it around the garden as mulch.
If you diverted the first flush of rainwater from your rain barrels, you can now capture rain through the rest of the season. If you held on to the water from the first rain, empty the barrels onto the soil and clean out the barrel before collecting more water.
Rather than collecting water in rain barrels, sculpt your garden soil to with dips and swales that capture water so it can absorb into the surrounding soil.
Bank water now for long-term withdrawal by your plants’ roots in spring.
Do you have a spot on your property that floods every year? Now’s the time to take action. Reconfigure the contours, install a new drain, lay out sandbags or do whatever else is needed to stop that flood.
Put wet weather gardening shoes on your holiday gift list. You don’t need galoshes, but a pair of waterproof shoes with good tread on the bottom really help in wet weather.
Install swales and redirect downspouts to the swales. Allow water to pool while it absorbs into the surrounding soil. Bank the water now for long-term withdrawal by your plants’ roots in spring.
While water is precious, don’t let it accumulate in dishes under potted plants, buckets, containers and other places where the constant moisture can drown plant roots or become a mosquito nursery.
When it does rain, stay off the soil for a few days. Wet soil compacts easily, so rather than dig or weed or plant, do chores like repotting plants, cleaning your toolshed and planning for spring.
Have you protected cold-sensitive plants yet? If your garden gets to freezing or below, protect cold-sensitive plants like Plumeria, some bromeliads, some kinds of succulents, etc.
Move them under the eaves (if in pots) or under the dense cover of an evergreen tree. Cover potted or in-ground plants with floating row cover (NOT plastic). Use clothespins to secure the cover in place.
Watch for the winter’s first frost.
Our gardens don’t get hard frosts, but plants from coast to mountains can suffer frost damage on a cold night.
Cover sensitive plants with woven frost cloth. Use clothespins to hold it in place around the plant.
Once a plant is damaged by frost, do not cut off damaged leaves, branches, etc. The damaged parts protect the rest of the plant from the next freezes. Leave them in place until after the last frost of the year, typically in February or March.
Prune
It’s time to have trees checked and trimmed by a certified arborist. Remove any weak branches, look for borer infestations, check for structural integrity. This is a task to do annually.
If you don’t have a favorite certified arborist, find one at www.treesaregood.org.
Sharpen your own pruning tools so you make clean, healthy cuts that don’t shred the wood.
Cut in the right spot. Follow each branch to where it attaches to the trunk or to the next larger branch.
Notice the swelling at the base of the branch? That’s called the branch collar. When you cut, cut back to the branch collar. The goal is to leave no stubs while leaving the branch collar intact.
Work clean. Disinfect pruning shears, saws, loppers and other cutting tools between plants so you don’t spread diseases and pests from one plant to the next. I clean my tools with
spray disinfectant. At the end of the day, my tools get sprayed again, then wiped dry and lubricated with mineral oil before I put them away.
Prune and spray roses — but not too much. There’s no reason to prune roses down to nubs. The more branches, the more flowers, so let your rosebushes grow large.
Strip the leaves off deciduous fruit trees like pluots and apples. Collect those on the ground, too, and send them all off in the green waste, then prune the branches.
Prune deciduous fruit trees. Know which part of the branch makes next year’s fruit — it differs with each kind of tree.
Apple trees, for example, develop fruits on short side spurs, while Pluots fruit along the length of branches. Figs fruit at the tips of branches. If you accidentally cut off the wrong part, you’ll have no fruit next year.
My favorite pruning reference is
“How to Prune Fruit Trees” by R. Sanford Martin. It’s a classic!
Spray deciduous fruit trees to kill overwintering pests and diseases.
Spray once, wait two weeks, then spray again. Spray a third time for best results (follow label directions). Alternate between:
• curl.
•
Liquid copper to kill the fungus responsible for the dreaded peach leaf
Horticultural oil to suffocate scale, whiteflies, mealy bugs and other tiny pests that overwinter in the bark.
Every time you spray, coat all branches and trunks, from tips to base. The better the coverage, the better for the trees and for next year’s crops.
Care for potted plants
Get the most from your holiday poinsettias. Remove the fancy foil as soon as you get it home. Be sure the pot has drainage holes. If it doesn’t, move the plant to a pot that drains.
Keep your poinsettia in a brightly lit room away from the heater vent and away from a cold window. Water enough to keep the soil damp but not wet. Don’t worry about fertilizing until after the holidays.
Monitor houseplants now. With the heat on indoors, potting soil dries out quickly. Feel the potting soil every few days so you can keep it damp.
A humidifier helps keep indoor air from drying out so much that the plants desiccate.
Plant ornamentals
Time to plant natives! Natives planted now will be ready to tolerate next summer’s heat and drought.
Add a native tree or two to your garden: coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia), scrub oak (Quercus berberidifolia), Engelmann’s oak (Quercus engelmannii), desert willow (Chilopsis linearis), sycamore (Platanus racemosa), western redbud (Cercis occidentalis), Tecate cypress (Hesperocyparis forbesii), or California buckeye (Aesculus californica).
Need a low maintenance hedge or screen? Try native lemonade berry (Rhus integrifolia), toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia), sugar bush (Rhus ovata) or Catalina cherry (Prunus ilicifolia ssp lyonii). Space the plants based on their mature size, then wait for them to fill in. Don’t make the mistake of crowding the plants; that sentences you to a lifetime of pruning.
For spring flowers, plant seeds of
California native poppy (Eschscholzia californica), elegant Clarkia (Clarkia unguiculata), baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii), California goldfields (Lasthenia californica) and
Common tidy tips (Layia platyglossa).
Love oddities? Plant the succulent, Seussian-looking native giant coreopsis (Leptosyne gigantea), which stands 3 to 6 feet tall and is covered in green leaves and bright yellow, daisylike flowers in spring. It goes dormant in summer.
Plant native trees and shrubs from the world’s other Mediterranean climates: cone bushes from South Africa,
Melaleucas from Australia, Acacia from around the world, and more.
Plant succulents. This is showtime for the beautiful Aeoniums, whose rosettes of succulent leaves look like a flower year-round. Try bright green
Aeonium urbicum, the green/ cream/pink variegated Aeonium ‘Sunburst,’ bronze-black Aeonium ‘Zwartkopf ’ or Aeonium ‘Cyclops,’ whose burgundy heads have a bright green “eye.”
Aeonium do great in both sun and shade along the coast, but they do better with a bit of midday protection inland.
They are the perfect edging plant, accent and underplanting for larger succulents and non-succulent plants.
Visit your favorite nursery to reserve bare-root fruit trees and shrubs that arrive next month: blueberries, peaches, apples, nectarines, pears, apricots and more.
Edible gardens
Before you replant pots or raised beds, add compost to bring the soil level back to the top. Sprinkle in earthworm castings and vegetable fertilizer.
No need to dig it in — that will happen naturally.
Plant winter root vegetable seeds now: beets, turnip, radish, carrots, rutabagas, parsnips.
Plant greens and cabbage family plants from seed or seedling: lettuce, spinach, kale, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, rapini, broccoli and more.
Plant annual parsley, dill and cilantro from seed. These annual herbs do best in vegetable gardens.
Plant perennial oregano, thyme, marjoram, sage and rosemary from 4-inch or 1-gallon pots into a permanent spot in the garden. Since they are all water-wise Mediterranean natives, you can plant them in ornamental garden beds.
To harvest greens — including lettuce, kale, spinach, bok choy and tatsoi — simply cut off as much as you need, and let the plants continue to
This is the fourth in an occasional series on
winners of the annual WaterSmart Landscape Contest,
partnership with the San Diego County Water
Authority. To learn about entering the next contest, visit landscapecontest.com.
For details on classes and resources through the
WaterSmart Landscape Makeover Program, visit conducted in
landscapemakeover.watersmartsd.org.
Landscape rebates are available through the
Socal WaterSmart Turf Replacement Program at