Southern Gardening

The winter months are a great time to get ready for the summer growing season. A project every gardener will benefit from is building a raised bed. Today Southern Gardening is at the Coastal Research and Extension Center in the demonstration People’s Garden. A raised bed is exactly as the name suggests: a landscape or garden bed that is higher than the surrounding grade. A raised bed should be no wider than 4 feet, so the longest reach is only 2 feet. This allows easy access to the bed from either side.

Sometimes the home gardener needs to move an existing shrub or small tree. The winter months are a perfect time to do this. Let me demonstrate how easy it is to move a shrub to a new spot in the landscape. We need to expand some research beds here at Coastal Research and Extension Center. Today we’re going to start moving these repeat blooming Watchet azaleas we’ve been evaluating to new locations in our landscape. These have been in the ground for about five years and will be easy to dig. Older plants will take more effort. I like to use a round point shovel.

Bromeliads are fascinating plants but are often misunderstood as being high maintenance and needing special green thumb skills. Let me show you how easy it is to care for and enjoy these beautiful plants. Bromeliads are bold and stylish houseplants and widely available at garden centers. These plants have gorgeous and long-lasting blooms in shades of pink, red and orange, that last for several weeks. The leaves are thick sword shaped straps that grow in a rosette. The rosette forms a natural cup structure that collects water in nature.

Every year at this time, a horticultural crime spree occurs, and the Horticulture CSI Unit is back in action. This time of year, we see countless cases of crape murder, and Crape myrtle is the victim. I’m going to share some pruning tips to keep you from being the perp! We see this crime against horticulture all around us where someone has hard pruned their crape myrtles to control their size. The trouble is crape myrtles are extremely resilient to being butchered.

One of the joys of our Mississippi winter landscapes are the gorgeous camellias. Growing up in the north I’ve always marveled at these evergreen shrubs blooming like this in the winter months. If you would like my recommendation of a shrub you should have in your landscape, then you need to try Shishi Gashira camellia. Shishi Gashira camellia is an outstanding flowering shrub and was a Mississippi Medallion award winner in 2002 and is still a winner in my book. It is very similar in leaf and flowering to our Sasanqua camellias and is often marketed as such.

Sometimes those gardeners who like to grow in containers don’t think there are many options in the winter. Today I’d like to share some ideas for cool season combo containers. There are actually quite a few cool season plants to use. Some of my favorites include the colors and textures of ornamental kale, cabbage and even mustard, colorful Matrix pansies and Sorbet viola and the bright spikes of Sonnet snapdragons. But many gardeners don’t think to put them together in the same container. Let’s take a look a few combo examples.