February Garden Tips

What to do in Your Garden this month:

Bare roots!!!! The local garden shops are filling up with their stock of bare root fruit trees. This time of year is prime time to plant bare root fruit trees. It’s also the right time to shape young trees and maintain your mature trees. For new bare root trees, be sure to plan accordingly for mature tree size as well as whether your new specimens are self-fruitful or require pollination partners.

Guidance on how and when to prune and manage your fruit trees for optimal health and harvest can be found here: Fruit Trees - Training and Pruning Deciduous Trees. Even brand new trees should be pruned to get a great start. For pruning of citrus trees you’ll want to wait until spring when harvest is completely over.

Don’t forget to add fresh compost to fruit trees, existing strawberry plants and your asparagus beds.

What to plant?

In February, we revisit many of the same plants that you could directly sow in January. Spinach, radishes, carrots, turnips, beets, peas and Asian greens such as bok choy and mustard greens can all be directly sown into your garden. You can also start seeds indoors for onions, lettuce, peas, leeks, Asian greens and brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, cabbage, etc.), as well as chard, kale, fennel, dandelion, shallots, raddichio and mache. Cilantro and Garlic can also be started outdoors.

In February you can transplant asparagus, rhubarb, strawberries, cane berries, grapes and of course fruit trees.

Flower lovers can start Hollyhocks, Scabiosa, Calendula, Gaillardia, Centaurea, Helenium, Viola, Yarrow, Rudbeckia, Columbine, Agastaches and Lavender indoors.

As always if you have a question about what to do in your garden, there is a tremendous body of knowledge about gardening in California, provided by University of California Cooperative Extension. This site, geared toward the home gardener can be found at http://cagardenweb.ucdavis.edu/.

Final thoughts…
If you haven’t done so already, give your garden tools, gloves and implements a good cleaning before you dig in. Now is also a good time to recheck your irrigation and replace any worn out or inefficient parts.

Enjoy watching your early bulbs start to bloom through February and March! There is nothing more cheerful than clusters of daffodils dotting the Mendocino hillsides. The promise of spring is right around the corner.

For year round tips on what to plant, click Greater Hopland Planting Guide (Peter Huff and Kate Frey's Monthly Planting Calendar for Inland Mendocino, also found at the "How to - Grow Food" page on The Garden's Project Website).