January Cold & Already Spring Planting?
To all you Beautiful Gardeners,
Do you wonder what to do if some of your veggies and herbs turn brown after freezing temperatures?
Try this:-)
If your plants have green areas still growing and you’ve time and patience, do nothing. Let the plants grow again. Leave the old dead brown leaves and branches as they stand, so as to help protect any new growth from being damaged in future cold weather. If freezing temperatures do return, just cover again to protect your crops. In fact all your plants under the cover will also grow faster from the lack of stress and warmer temperatures.
Then after the last frost, you can cut out the brown stalks. You could choose to drop the old brown branches onto the soil around your recovering plant. This will return organic matter to your soil with no cost and a minimum effort. That’s what nature does, so just follow nature’s way and you couldn’t be smarter:-)
However, if you had a very hard freeze for many hours and your plants are dead, dead, dead and brown with no sign of life, remove, chop and place on the compost pile. You will then return organic matter back to the soil.
That reminds me, keep a look out for the release of my new workshop, “How to Build an 18 Day Compost Pile.” This one is a real money saver, you won’t want to miss it!
Now all this composting talk also reminds me. Spring planting in Tucson is in January….yes January…think about it, this is a great time to be in the garden or even to build a new garden. SPRING IS HERE!! Look at your planting guide under January. The calendar is loaded with delicious options from artichokes to turnips.
Haven’t got a planting guide? Well just come to the Garden Goddess booth, at St. Philips of Sunday, 9am-1pm, pick up my DVD, “How to Install and Maintain a Vegetable Garden,” and learn how to get a FREE $10 planting guide or make a donation to The Community Gardens of Tucson and pick one up! 100% of the donation goes to CGT.
Happy New Year …It’s all good in January, see you….gg
