Off topic

Now is the time to gear up for spring, before the rain comes. Turn the compost over in your garden beds, spread manure on your lawns, after aerating, and beds and prune those unsightly branches or shrubs, especially the evergreens. Also for propagating or layering perennials start looking around for specimens to propagate before they start budding and possibly flag them so that you remember where they are located. You can fertilize your garden beds too. I suggest Espoma@ espoma.com. The fertilizer they sell happens to smell so don’t be alarmed. I use Scott’s “Turf Builder” on the lawn, because I haven’t found anything better that greens up a brown lawn although if we get heavy spring rains the fertilizer could wash through the soil faster. I use to start my vegetable seeds indoors this time of year, but if you don’t have the proper location or heat underneath you’ll get frustrated like I did, and you will get long leggy seedlings. I start my cucumbers and squashes in the garden and always use bonemeal. When I was in college they taught us to use Super Phosphate when transplanting but I found it can burn the roots. If you burn wood use the wood ash in your garden beds or on your lawn.

Heavenly Bamboo

Nandina Domestica or Heavenly Bamboo is not a true bamboo but is an evergreen woody plant. It grows to a height of 8 feet if left unattended and is a great screening woody plant for the landscape garden bed, showing bright red berries in the winter contrasted by its reddish dark green foliage. Propagating for me has been from seedlings after the fruit drops to the ground. I have propagated hundreds of plants by this method, but the soil must be friable around the mature plants and moist for the berries to germinate. The picture of the mature planting was grown from seedlings. In North Carolina it is a fast grower if provided water on a regular basis and transplanted into larger containers, pruning the roots when re-potting along with adding bone meal. It is hardy to -10 degrees, but may die back but in the spring new shoots will appear. It is best when potting seedlings to plant 3 or more seedlings in the same container so a bushy plant emerges. Pruning in the spring before new growth shows will also produce a denser plant. There are many varieties of Nandina, from dwarf to mid size and different color leaf variations for the landscape garden, but the dwarf varieties do not have showy berries and their leaves are almost pink. It is a great screening plant to hide unsightly areas especially in winter. Other woody plants that also sows seeds are the Redbud and Dogwood, medium sized trees in North Carolina with purple and white flowers in the spring before the leaf buds break. When digging any seedlings make certain enough soil is taken with the seedling, which more then likely fall away when transplanting, because the roots systems are not dense and you want to get as many roots as possible when replanting, which should be as soon as possible, before the roots dry out. I get my containers on E-Bay and one can buy lots of as few as 10. I use 1 gallon containers initially, then transplant into 3 gallon.