| A Master Gardener's guide to gardening in a hot dry climate
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Wake up and eat. As the days become
longer and the overnight low temperatures rise, your plants
are beginning to come out of winter dormancy. And they
Over the winter plants have grown
slowly underground, spreading their roots ever further in
search of new food sources. Now they are ready to make
an upward push -- producing new branches, new leaves, and
most important of all, new flowers which will lead to seeds.
Creating seeds for reproduction is what plants aim to do.
It is their reason for being.
Yummy Mulch. You
can help your plants by add a good mulch--full of
organic materials--around trees and shrubs and in flower
beds. Then add a balanced fertilizer. In many
desert gardens you may have to add sulfur, iron or other
minerals to allow your plants to grow and produce flowers
and seeds. Ask for recommendations from your local
nursery for the best fertilizer for your soil specific
conditions. Don't rely on fertilizer you've seen
advertised on TV. It is unlikely to be suitable for
desert alkaline soils.
Why Mulch Twice a
Year? Much of the soil in the desert Southwest
is alkaline. Not many plants grow well in alkaline
soil. So, as every good desert gardener knows, when you
establish a new garden the first thing to do is improve
the soil with good organic mulch.
What happens after your install the
plants in the nutritious soil you have created is this:
the plants gobble up all the nutrition in the soil within a
Surprisingly quickly, the soil
reverts to its alkaline state. Some plants may
continue to survive--after a fashion--particularly if you
dose them with fertilizer. But adding more and more
fertilizer is like treating the symptoms without getting to
the root cause. By renewing the mulch in Spring and
Fall will do much more to maintain a healthy growing
environment for the plants in your desert garden.
||If you plan to grow roses
as beautiful as this David Austin rose, 'Sir Edward
Elgar', you absolutely must enrich the soil around
the bush once or twice a year. Roses are
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