Herself’s Houston Garden

We made our first visit to Tokyo in the winter, our next visit will be in warmer weather and I’ll be visiting botanical gardens then. But for now here are a few photos from formal gardens about the city.

We were surprised to see so little bamboo. It is usually in patches about 20′x20′ and along the highway but rarely a part of the garden.

Every plant in the garden is bonsai’d. Here we tell people not to mushroom their shrubs or amputate their crapes, yet every plant in every Tokyo garden we saw was heavily pruned.

Along pathways tree branches are forced to grow across and down and supported with ropes and boards.

No plant is left untouched.

Today I went to a talk given by the owner of Pineywoods Nursery on fruit and nut trees and attracting wildlife. Perfect timing as January is when most of the local fruit and nut tree sales take place and after the great freeze of twenty-ten you’ve probably got a few bare spots to fill in the garden.

While Tree Search Farms is a wholesale only tree seller, I’m told the website is an excellent source of information about local fruit trees. Anything they sell does well here.

Useful things I learned at this talk:
If your fruit tree isn’t fruiting it is usually because winter wasn’t cold enough or you don’t have enough pollinators. To attract bees plant various cupheas (Bat faced cuphea, Cuphea ignea, Mexican Heather ) around your fruit trees.

Fruit trees should be heavily pruned, but are easily infected, use sterile tools.

Tips for proper tree planting in Houston

PineyWoods recommends these fruit trees for the Houston area:
PawPaw – fruit is similar to bananas, spoils rapidly, fruit is high theft item from local critters, you’ll need to be quick

Mexican Plum ( prunus Mexicana ) great for dry areas

Chinkapin (Castanea pumila ) Chestnut tree, grows slowly but very tall

Mayhaw (Crataegus opaca) Hawthorne, loves damp areas

Darrows Blueberry ( Baccinium darrowii) stays compact, good foundation plant, need male and female plants to get berries.

Black Cherry ( Prunus serotina) Tall tree, interesting bark

Grapes ( Ison muscadine ) build a very strong trellis first

Mexican Thornless lime- only hybridized limes grow in Houston, this plant is good for pots

Improved Meyers Lemon – best lemon for Houston area

Republic of Texas Orange – only good orange for the Houston area

Rio Red Grapefruit

Blood Oranges

Celeste fig, brown turkey is best

Beauty Plums – need multiple varieties to produce

Red Barron Peaches

Dorsett Golden Apples

Housi Pear

Fuyu persimmons – a great wildlife attractor if you don’t like persimmons

Garnet Pomegranate

Jan 16th
9 am – 2pm Sale/ 730-2pm Symposium
Fruit and Nut Sale ( pdf flyer ) 3033 Bear Creek Drive, Houston.

Jan 23
Program 8-9, Sale 9-1pm
Fruit and Nut Tree Sale Montgomery County Master Gardeners

And if you miss the sales, just drop by Pineywoods Nursery they have plenty of fruit trees for sale.

* Note: When your fruit tree comes back from the great freeze, be sure it’s your fruit tree and not a Flying Dragon which is the root stock most of our fruit trees are grafted to. Flying Dragon is curvy with large thorns, remove immediately or you’ll be sorry.

It’s only just begun.

First came the December freeze. All the tropicals lost their leaves. There’s so many of them that the garden smelled like rotting lettuce for a week. ( I’m pretty sure that didn’t win me points with the neighbors. )

The yellow and black bamboos lost their leaves and wilted, the greens are holding up so far.

The gingers have died back to the ground to await warmer weather.

The younger cactus have wilted, the older cactus have blackened tips.

Surprising to me the mother-in-laws tongues have help up well, I ‘ll plant more of them come spring.

This week lows will be in the twenties. For a light freeze covering your plants with fabric, then plastic helps, at 20′F that’s not going to do much.

Do not cut your plants back. I know they look bad, but if you cut them back they’ll try to grow on warmer days and the new growth will die back on the next cold night. Be patient, wait till spring to cut your plant back and more of them will survive the winter.

It’s been rainy so no need to water.

Adding mulch never hurts, or layers of newspaper. Plastic can not be touching the plant to do any good. Put paper or fabric between the plant and the plastic.

Large rocks in the sun heat up and stay warm a little way into the night, plants near rocks, and stone walls will have better protection.

In the spring the strong plants will still be here, in place or rebuilding themselves from the ground up. Let nature decide what plants should be in your garden. Come spring, replant the lost ones with something new.

The climate usually gives us a couple decades of warm weather, then a couple decades of cold weather. It’s too soon to tell if this is just a bad winter or whether we are returning to the colder winters of the 1980s. But I’m thinking I’ll be planting less tropicals come spring.

Down here on the Gulf Coast root knot nematodes can destroy gardens. Commonly people bring them home on tomato plants and once in the garden they are near impossible to eradicate.

I’ve been reading ‘Silent Spring’ in bits and pieces and tonight’s reading mentioned the use of marigolds as a treatment for root knot nematodes. After a bit of digging through old texts and online I discovered marigolds are still commonly used as a treatment for infected soils.

In ‘Silent Spring’ Rachael discusses success had planting marigolds among roses in some infected soil. Down here it’s your vegetable garden that is likely to be the problem.

The marigolds release alpha-terthienyl through the roots. The alpha-terthienyl is extremely toxic to nematodes, many insects and viruses. It works by preventing the hatching of the nematode eggs.

In addition, nematodes can not feed on marigold hosts, so you are also denying the nematodes food.

While you can always plant nematode resistant plants ( check for the N on the plant label ) Marigolds might be a nicer option.

Not all marigolds will prevent and harm root knot nematodes, do a bit of research first.

Varieties recommended for control of southern root knot nematode include: Tagetes patula, T. erecta, T. minuta.

More information:
Marigolds ( Tagetes spp. ) for Nematode Management