Winter is here. When it comes to your garden, winter is the time to spring into action by sharpening all your tools and applying tung oil to the wood handles. Also, it is a good time of the year to get your mowers ready for spring and summer.

Now is also a great time to finish mulching the leaves on the lawn and flowerbeds, getting them ready for Spring planting.  It is also a good time to start vegetable plants, flowers, & herbs, from seeds.  Whether in a green house or on a sunny windowsill, you can select the exact varieties to add to your flower beds. There is a good savings in starting plants this way. There are many seed catalogs from which to choose. Also, it is a wonderful time to select trees to be planted.

Trees are dormant this time of the year, easier to handle, and the ground should be easier to dig up. Planting trees will give you the best rate of return on your home investment outside. Because trees are dormant this time of the year, it is the best time to do the heavy trimming. They will heal naturally without anything applied to the wound. If you feel that something is needed because the cut may be too deep, use hydrogen peroxide, which will clean the wound naturally. If you have fruit trees, now is the time of the year to spray dormant oil for pests.

We are now within the window to put down a good pre-emergent for weed control.  The weeds you currently see now are annual weeds which will die out as our temperatures start to change. Along with the change in our temperatures, we will see different annual weeds appear. They are at the seed stage waiting for warmer days and nights so they can start to emerge. They include crabgrass, dandelions, purslane, lambsquarter, barnyard grass, and even bermuda grass. Yes, bermuda grass is a weed that we use for our lawns, especially in southern regions because it does look nice and is very drought tolerant. Bermuda grass can be seeded, but not until the hot days of summer.

Do not worry when using pre-emergent for your lawns this time of the year.  It will only attack the other weeds mentioned along with some others.  You can actually use the pre-emergent weed and feed when seeding with cool season grasses.  You need to use caution when doing this and wait to apply the weed control after the grasses have started growing.  My choice for annual weed control is corn gluten meal.  Spread the corn gluten meal at the rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet.  Corn gluten meal is the byproduct of corn and is safe to use around children and pets! It is also used as food for cows, cats, dogs, fish and poultry.  It is a natural weed suppressant.  It dehydrates the weed seeds when dry and keeps them from germinating.  The product that is currently on the market is very good with 9% to 10% nitrogen and is an excellent natural fertilizer.

If your budget allows you can also add humate, which is low grade lignite coal.  Humate is a natural soil conditioner.  Adding it to the soil at the rate of 4 to 6 pounds per 1000 square feet increases the utilization and retention of fertilizers being used preventing them from being leached away from your grasses and plants root zone.  It also improves the water holding capacity of the soil.

Happy gardening!