Make sure you adjust your gardening, landscaping for the changing North Texas weather

Someone was just saying to me, “This certainly hasn’t been a normal North Texas spring.”

That made me wonder exactly what “normal” might be when it comes to the weather around here. No two springs are alike. Some are wet. Some are dry. Some are warm, and some are just downright cold.

One of the most unusual springs I can remember was five years ago. In 2015 there were parts of the Metroplex that got more than 70 inches of rain, and much of it fell in the spring. It was difficult to find times to get the tasks in our landscapes and gardens done unless we were willing to work in the rain.

Stop me if any of that is sounding familiar. There’s no way of predicting if we’ll hit those big numbers for rainfall this calendar year, but we’re already way ahead for the springtime. And when you start looking at lists of things you need (and have needed) to accomplish, that’s when you realize how far behind you are falling.

Let me try to bring things back up to speed. Let’s make such a list. I’ll do it in short bursts that should fold together to complete the gardening puzzle.

• March 20-ish is the average date of the last killing frost for the Metroplex (it varies depending on whether you’re in the urban heat pocket surrounded by concrete or out in one of the suburbs.) That means that from that date on you have better than a 50 percent chance of newly planted frost-sensitive plants surviving. It’s a bell-shaped curve.

The latest date that I’ve seen a killing frost in our area was April 11, and that one did a lot of damage. But if you’re any kind of a gambler, you can start planting tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, corn, marigolds, zinnias and other frost-sensitive plants in the next few days. A week from now your odds will be even better.

• On the other hand, if the rainy weather kept you from planting vegetables like onions, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and Irish potatoes, you’ve already missed it for this year. Save your valuable garden space for the warm-season crops. You get about a two-week window of opportunity with each of those crops. The window is governed by the oncoming heat of late spring and summer.

• That same line of thinking applies to cool-season color, including petunias, sweet alyssum, stocks, larkspurs and snapdragons. It soon becomes too late to plant them. Hot weather will catch them before they can complete their productive life cycles. If it gets much later, go for the warm-season bloomers instead.

• If you still haven’t applied your pre-emergent weedkiller granules (Dimension, Halts or Balan) to prevent crabgrass and grassburs this summer, you’ll still get a lot of help from them if you apply them this weekend. You really do need to get the job done by mid-March each year, but you’ll still prevent germination of many of their seeds even if you do miss a few. But don’t wait past this weekend. Oh, and these are not “weed-and-feed” products. These are strictly pre-emergent weedkiller granules. It’s still a couple of weeks too early to fertilize.

• Looking to plant new sod in your lawn this spring? The good news is that the rain hasn’t pushed you too far behind. Prime time is just coming up in April and May, but you’ll want to wait until the soil has dried enough that you can rototill and rake it. Don’t make the mistake of laying new sod out over old grass and expecting it to take root. Give it the best possible chance by preparing a good planting surface. If you’re thinking about seeding bermudagrass, wait until May when the ground has warmed considerably more.

• Spring pruning is delayed or should be saved. You want to prune spring-blooming shrubs and vines immediately after they finish flowering. That would include forsythias, bridal wreaths, flowering quince, azaleas, wisterias, Carolina jessamine, crossvine and all the others. The time to prune and reshape them is directly after their last petals have fallen. Don’t let that chance slip past you.

• Rose pruning really got away from many of us. The goal is always to prune rose bushes back by 50 percent and to do so in the first two weeks of February. Knockout roses especially need that reshaping because they grow so dense in a hurry. But by now they should be vigorous and blooming. You’re many weeks too late to trim them. It would be a huge setback. Instead, remove individual canes as needed and wait for early August to do a less-extensive job of pruning to stimulate the fall bloom.

In the meantime, double check all of your roses to be sure they’re not infected with rose rosette virus. Look for rank, thick stems with excessive quantities of thorns and buds that don’t open properly. If you get confirmation that you have rosette in your roses, the affected plants must be removed immediately. They will only serve to infect other roses in the neighborhood.

You can hear Neil Sperry on KLIF 570AM on Saturday afternoons 1-3 pm and on WBAP 820AM Sunday mornings 8-10 am. Join him at www.neilsperry.com and follow him on Facebook.

This story was originally published March 21, 2020 at 6:00 AM.