April Wimberley Gardening Blog
The thunderstorms that often roll through Wimberley in the springtime have mostly missed us locally, but there is every reason to expect more to come that will surely bring life-sustaining water to our soil, lakes, rivers, ponds, and aquifers. We always need as much rain as possible during April and the months before summer starts. Every Texan knows that the heat will come and do its best to dry up or plants, trees, and bodies of water.
Hardly anything says springtime like the mild, sunny days of April. With mostly cool mornings followed by warm and sunny days, the garden fairly calls to us to come and dig! The punctuation of lovely showers and the first thunderstorms of the spring are just part of the joy of gardening in Texas at this time of year. Check out these tips from the Central Texas Gardener too!
Spring Into April Gardening
With Spring in full swing, we turn our gardening attention to the growing season ahead. If you are building a garden in a new spot, or in a space that has not been gardened for a while, now is the best time to make sure whatever you grow there will be all it can be. Enrich the soil with decomposed organic material like peat moss, compost, humus, or manure. To make sure your soil has plenty of nitrogen, you can add cottonseed meal or blood meal. Boost the available phosphorus with rock phosphate or bone meal, then add greensand for potassium and micronutrients. These nutrients will feed your plants for a long time. You’ll have a garden all ready for earthworms and some seeds or transplants!
The garden center is packed with gorgeous plants just waiting to be adopted and given a good home at your place. Some of the growers where our plants are born were set back by the ice storm, but most have recovered, so we are working hard for you every day to keep the nursery stocked with all the plants you might want for your next gardening project. Not every plant we want is available every week, but you can be sure we’ll have all your favorite plants in stock through the season. Stop in just to browse and see what’s new in the nursery, and feel free to let us know or give us a call if there’s something, in particular, you are looking for.
Plants Available at King Feed This Month
April brings us to the full-tilt vegetable gardening season, and it is time for planting all of those warm-season favorites right now! Eggplants, melons, cucumbers, squash, corn, tomatoes, peppers, okra, and more should be in the ground soon to get a good start while the weather is moderate. You still have time to plant cool-season veggies in the first part of April. The next recommended planting time for cooler weather veggies like broccoli, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, spinach, and lettuce will be this fall.
Yard and Garden Fertilizer
Free mulch and free fertilizer. Most of us have plenty of nutrition-rich organic material covering the ground right now, thanks to Mother Nature’s plan to have Live Oaks, Sierra Oaks, and Mexican White Oaks shed their leaves in the spring. One of the basic tenets of local economics is to use indigenous materials that are readily at hand whenever possible, and we have lots of these. Mow over them two or three times to chop them up, then either leave them on the ground to feed the grass and trees or rake them into your compost pile, mixing them with fresh organic material like grass clippings or kitchen scraps and some soil or old compost. Alternatively, use them either chopped or whole as native mulch atop the ground around your flowers, vegetables, trees, or shrubs, allowing them to decompose through the season, feeding the soil and your garden for free! In the fall, you can till or dig them directly into the soil in an unused garden space to decompose and enrich the soil over the winter and start the next spring with renewed vigor.
Fertilizer For Gardens and Yards In Wimberley, Texas
Don’t forget to get your ornamental grasses and lawn areas off to a good nutritional start for the year with good feeding. We developed King’s Premium Lawn Food just for lawns, trees, and shrubs here. It is a 20-10-5 formula, with half of the nitrogen in slow-release form and a strong micronutrient package. We also have several excellent certified organic lawn foods from brand names you rely on.
Raised beds and container gardening have always been practical options in Wimberley due to our thin, rocky, alkaline soil. Growing in pots, raised beds, planter boxes, and hanging baskets is a straightforward way to grow your favorite plants with less labor. Container gardening is easier to keep weed-free and can usually be kept out of the reach of deer with less effort. When growing in containers of any kind, I recommend using a quality potting mix because they wind up being more cost-effective than using a lower-quality mix to which more soil amendments need to be added. If you are creating a larger raised bed, then you can easily make your own raised bed soil mix. Using readily available components like sandy loam, compost, peat moss, perlite, vermiculite, rock phosphate, and greensand.
