A new gardening year is upon us. Tackle these tasks now in North Texas

Half your success in gardening depends on doing the right things. The other half depends on doing them at the right times.

I’ve been preaching that gospel all my career, and since we’re at the headwaters of another gardening year, this would be the time to list the first goals for your checklist. These are the tasks that need to be done as soon as you can.

▪ Disconnect hoses from faucets during freezing weather to prevent ice damage within the walls of your house.

▪ Buy a roll of frost cloth and have it on hand in case you need to cover any vulnerable plants during extreme cold. It can be reused in future years, and it’s well worth the modest investment. Buy it now. Don’t wait until you need it.

▪ Get power equipment in for repairs. If it wasn’t running properly as you put it away for the winter, it’s not going to be any better come spring. Avoid the rush. Take it in now.

▪ Have your soil tested. Gardening is a journey, and your soils are the highway. Each part of your garden (turf, vegetables, landscape, etc.) should be given a soil test at least every three or four years. The most reliable lab is at Texas A&M. All the collecting instructions, mailing information, and costs are on their website (soiltesting.tamu.edu). Avoid the rush. Send your samples now.

▪ Plan your spring landscaping upgrades. If it’s been more than a few years since you remodeled your landscape, odds are that things have been influenced in a bad way by severe winters and harsh droughts. Nurseries will have excellent supplies of plants in a couple of months. Work with a landscape architect or nursery designer now to develop your plans. Be ahead of the crush of spring customers.

▪ Prepare your vegetable garden plot soon so you’ll be ready for the first spring plantings. Believe it or not, the first vegetable crops need to be planted three weeks from now here in the Metroplex. Rototill to a depth of 12 inches and incorporate five or six inches of a combination of well-rotted compost, equally decomposed manure, finely ground pine bark mulch, and sphagnum peat moss. Incorporate one inch of expanded shale to loosen tight clay soils. Then, each time that you rework the soil before successive plantings, add a couple of inches of additional organic matter and rototill again.

Nowhere in my list is timing as important as it is with vegetables. Onions and English peas come first, but all the later ones are equally critical in their planting dates. Post a list of your favorites and be sure you hit each of their two- or three-week prime planting windows. If you miss them, hot late spring weather will render them of poor quality and probably unusable at the table.

▪ Transplant established plants, either from your own property or from nature into your landscape. This must be done while trees and shrubs are fully dormant. That means between now and mid-February.

▪ Prune peach and plum trees to remove all strongly vertical shoots and to develop a cereal-bowl form on each plant. Mature height should be 9 or 10 ft. Width will be 14 to 16 ft. That will expose ripening fruit to more sunlight. It will also make harvesting easier and it will greatly lessen the chance of limb breakage from fruit load.

▪ Remove “water sprouts” from apples. Those are the strongly vertical shoots that develop from the branches. Otherwise, little pruning will be needed.

▪ Remove damaged or rubbing branches from pear trees. Otherwise, no regular pruning should be needed. No pruning will be required for figs unless plants are damaged by extreme cold.

▪ Remove 80% to 85% of cane growth from grape vines each winter. Train vines to grow along trellises or wires in the process.

▪ Do light pruning and shaping of summer-flowering shrubs and vines, but never “top” a crape myrtle for any purported reason. It’s the fastest way to destroy their natural beauty and limit their flowering output.

▪ Water plants during prolonged winter dry spells. Extreme cold does more damage to plants that are dry. Soak the ground thoroughly two or three days ahead of seriously cold weather. Mulching also helps slow the rate of soil temperature changes.

▪ Put feeders out for the birds. This is the best season of all to get his hobby started. Texas is in the migratory path of dozens of species, so we see them coming and going. We also have dozens more that live here year ‘round, and all these birds are attracted to gardens that offer supplies of their favorite seeds.

Birding specialty stores have a wide assortment of seed types and feeders. Many have employees who are avid bird watchers themselves, so their help is invaluable. We have seven feeders up in our backyard in the woods, and it’s rare that we don’t have 15 or 20 birds flitting around at any given time. I keep a log of all the types that I’ve seen, and some of the migrants have come from as far away as British Columbia.