Rains likely to bring unwanted surprises to North Texas yards. Here’s what to expect

Don’t get me wrong. I love rain. My wife thinks I’m crazy, but as a Native Texan, I’ve always considered rain like money in the bank. Not that I’d wish flooding on anyone, but if we can go into the summer with our reservoirs filled and fields that are green and thriving, that’s a good thing.

However, with all this rain we’ve had over the past several weeks, there are some things — not necessarily good things — that we may need to expect. I thought this might be a good time to point them out so you’d be put on alert.

▪ Mosquitos are terrible. Step outside and you’ll see what I mean. They’re not just annoying. They carry diseases. Protect yourself by applying DEET or other repellent every time you spend minutes outdoors. While you’re at it, spray your pants and legs to protect against chiggers. As long as grass and weeds are green and temperatures cool, they’ll be an issue.

▪ Fire ant mounds are springing up everywhere. When the water table in the soil rises following heavy rains, they build their mounds up and out of the ground to get air. That’s when kids, unsuspecting adults, and even pets can accidentally bump into the mounds and encounter them in a hostile way. There are excellent insecticides for individual mound treatments and area-wide baits. Use them. Don’t mess with the home remedies. Texas A&M has good information online.

▪ Nutrients will need to be replenished. Your lawn, shrubs, flowers, and vegetables will need to be fed again as soon as possible. Rain leaches the nutrients, most notably nitrogen, out of their root zones. If it’s been longer than six or seven weeks since you last fed the turf and landscape, make plans to do so soon. Soil tests show that most local soils need all-nitrogen foods.

▪ Some plants may wilt on the first sunny day. Don’t be surprised if plants like tomatoes, oakleaf hydrangeas and other large-leafed plants wilt when the hot sun first hits their leaves. It won’t be because they need to be watered. They just won’t be able to pull the water up through their systems fast enough to meet the demands. In human terms, they’ve “grown soft” during all the humid weather, and they’ll have to acclimate to more summer-like conditions. In the meantime, the sentence that sounds like a typo: Don’t water the wet soil.

▪ Odd root-like growths on the stems of your tomato plants. These are called “adventitious” roots. That’s a term for roots that appear where roots normally would not be growing. It happens when soil is overly wet and the plant’s normal roots are basically drowning. It tries to throw out these extra roots, but they’re rarely enough. Hopefully your situation is just trending that way and not fully due to severe waterlogging. This is precisely why you want to raise your garden bed by several inches. You can always add water. It is much more difficult to subtract it.

▪ Mushrooms, toadstools, and the like. These funguses like moisture, and it’s spring weather like we’ve been having that lets them know they’re in the right place. You’ll find them wherever there is decaying organic matter like lawn thatch, tree leaves, twigs, roots, rotting manure and compost — you get the picture. They are saprophytes, not parasites. Most types are harmless to living “good” plants. You can either enjoy the novelty of all their many types or break them off if you find them unsightly.

▪ Slime mold. That one sounds awful, doesn’t it. It looks like cigarette ashes, and it develops on the blades of turf, notably St. Augustine. It’s the spores of the fungus, and the great news is that it’s harmless. Other than shading the leaves, it’s just using the blades for support. St. Augustine blades are wide, so you’ll notice the spores there, but they will appear on other ground-level surfaces, too. You can either let slime mold run its course, or you can wash it off with a hard stream of water. No big deal.

▪ Leaf drop of shade trees when it turns hot. It’s like clockwork. By late June or July every summer, you can count on silver maples, mulberries, cottonwoods, catalpas, and other large-leafed, fast-growing shade trees to start dropping leaves. It will be the older leaves farther down on the limbs, and it won’t necessarily point to any type of nutrient shortage. It’s just those trees’ way of telling us that they can’t draw water up fast enough to meet all the demands created by the flush of new growth they put on during “the good times” like we had this spring. It’s like a premature autumn, and it happens every year. It may be magnified this year.

▪ Check your new trees to be sure they’re all plumb. With wet and soft soils and all the recent winds, be sure newly planted trees are still standing vertically. If not, use your sharpshooter spade to adjust the soil ball gently so that you can make the necessary corrections. Then stake and guy the tree firmly. Pad the trunk so you won’t rub through the bark. Leave it secured for one to two years.

Side note: Be sure to wrap the trunks of new red oaks, chinquapin oaks, red maples, Chinese pistachios, and other thin-barked trees for their first year to protect them from sunscald. This is a critical practice that is very often neglected.