What Does That Mean?! Decoding Garden Terms
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Dallas Garden School podcast. I'm your host, north Texas gardening expert. Callie Works. Leary School is now in session.
[00:00:11] Hello there, gardener. On today's podcast, I thought we would talk about some words that some people assume that you know. Right? I am the number one most guilty person of doing this. When I am teaching to my students. I try as best I can to have a beginner's mind.
[00:00:33] But sometimes I will just get excited about a particular topic and start using words that make total sense to me, but make no sense to some other people. So that's what we're doing today. We're going to go through some words that you may have heard me used before, but you don't exactly know what they mean and how they relate to gardening.
[00:00:58] Let's just dive right in. The first word is deadhead. No, it does not describe someone who travels around the country. Following a jam band to deadhead is the process of removing spent flowers on a plant. That have reached the end of their lifecycle and are dying back. Deadheading is simply the process of removing them, and you can deadhead in a few different ways.
[00:01:26] For some plants, you can just lop off the blossom and you don't have to worry about anything else. For some plants, it's a better idea. To cut back to just above a set of leaves. What this does is encourage branching,
[00:01:42] and this is a really good way to increase the number of blooms that are on the plant and keep the plant in a shorter. Bushier shape. Just this morning I was out doing this for my zinnias. Zinnias are one plant that really needs regular deadhead to continue to look good all summer long. And especially with zinnias you want to harvest as if you're cutting for a floral arrangement. You want to cut the stem down to above a set of leaves. And typically with zinnias it's easy because you can already start to see two more. shoots branching out, and so you'll cut right above those.
[00:02:26] Then that will encourage those new growth shoots to grow and bloom, hence more zenya and also a plant that's not quite so top heavy. The next word is transplant. Transplant can be used as both a noun and a verb. We can transplant. A plant into the ground let's say we went to the nursery, we picked up a plant.
[00:02:54] We want to put it into our garden. We will take the plant out of the pot, we will dig a hole, and then we will plant that plant into the ground. That process of taking that plant, whether you started it yourself, whether you bought it at a nursery and putting it into the ground, we call transplanting.
[00:03:13] You can also refer to a plant that has just been recently put into the ground, something that was recently transplanted, you could say.
[00:03:22] These transplants of xenias. Or you could also just use transplant to refer to a plant that has not yet been planted . The next term is direct. So, and I use this term frequently because it differentiates between starting seeds indoors and sowing or planting seeds directly in the garden. I use this a lot because I teach indoor seed starting.
[00:03:51] I think it's one of the most incredible skills that you can have as a gardener, so I always try to differentiate and be very clear. When I am referring to a plant that's been started indoors, or a plant that has been direct sewn or planted directly into the ground. When I take my pumpkin seeds, I prefer to direct sow them rather than start them indoors.
[00:04:19] The next term is pinch. There are certain flowers that benefit from the process of pinching, and pinching is very closely related to deadheading. The purpose of pinching is. To maintain a plant's shape and encourage branching and bushiness. There are several flowers that before you even get them into the ground, they're still in the cell tray, you've started them indoors.
[00:04:47] Once they reach about six inches tall, you want to pinch them back to encourage that branching from the base of the plant. Examples would be snapdragons or sweet peas. And cosmos. Those are three flowers that before I even put them in the ground, while they're still in the cell tray, I'm going to pinch them back to just above a set of leaves.
[00:05:10] I typically like to leave two sets of leaves behind. And that's pinching. You can also pinch back. Basil. Basil tends to flower a lot in the summer, and once the basil starts to flower it has reached the next phase of its lifecycle, which is to produce flowers and to produce seed and complete
[00:05:32] the reproductive lifecycle. We don't want our basil to do that. We want our basil to continue putting on foliage and also to have a bush year plant. We will pinch back our basil frequently throughout the seasons. You could also call that deadheading basil, but most commonly when we're referring to pinching back basal, , we use pinching instead of deadheading.
[00:05:55] The next phrase is to cut back, which I actually just used and every summer in July, we here in North Texas do something that gardeners, lovingly refer to as the Texas chop. Inspired by the Chelsea Chop, a phrase coined by British gardeners to refer to the same. Cutting back of plants. And they do it around the same time that the Chelsea Flower show is being held.
[00:06:27] So they call it the Chelsea Chop. We stole that for ourselves and call it the Texas chop. One way to maintain a perennial garden that looks good all year long is to cut perennials back in July. And what that does is it reshapes the plants. It also stimulates more blooming and it. Helps the plant continue to look good and even look its best in the fall season.
[00:06:55] And cutting back is the process of what it sounds like. We're cutting back the plant to a smaller size. Some plants only need about 30% of the plant cut back. Some need up to 70% of the plant cut back and you can cut back some plants more than just in July. Some plants, for example, salvia Greg AI really benefits from. Being cut back multiple times throughout the growing season in order to maintain a dense bloom, and also to help it maintain its shape and not get so lanky and laggy.
[00:07:33] The next word is bolt. I'll use it in a sentence. Oh, you know what? I love this new lettuce variety because it didn't bolt early. It was really heat tolerant, and so it didn't bolt early in the season. I was able to grow it a lot longer, or darn it. My cilantro has bolted? That plant is done for bolting is the process of a plant going to flower, most commonly, we're going to use the term bolt to refer to a plant that we are growing either for its foliage or something like a ahead of broccoli. We're not growing it for its flowers. And once that plant starts to flower, typically stimulated by.
[00:08:22] Ambient temperature and also day length, so how many hours of daylight we have that tends to trigger the bolting process or it triggers a plant to flower here in North Texas, we most commonly deal with issues of heat causing cool season crops to bolt, but cold can also cause bolting. After a plant has been growing for a period of time and then there is a prolonged period of cold that convinces the plant that it has gone through winter and should flower as soon as temperatures warm.
[00:09:03] A good example of that is the onion plant. Usually a small percentage of every crop of onions that you will grow, at least in my experience over many years, is that a certain percentage of onions will bolt, and it's typically related to temperature stress that it experienced through the winter.
[00:09:23] It will cause the onion to send up a flower stock. We don't want that because it affects our ability to store that onion. But that's an example of how cold can cause bolting as well.
[00:09:38] Our next phrase is harden off. When we start seeds in indoors, those. Delicate little seedlings need to be gradually introduced to outdoor conditions, whether we have started them in the winter for spring planting, or whether we have started them in the summer for fall planting. In both instances, we need to gradually introduced those seedlings to outdoor temperatures to wind.
[00:10:07] And to direct sun. And often of those three direct sun can be the most dangerous for small seedlings. The best advice I can give you about hardening off is do it as slowly as possible over as long of a period as possible.
[00:10:21] It's a lot easier to do. When I start my tomato seedlings indoors in January, they will eventually go into the garden in March after the last frost. But before I can plant them, I need to harden them off. I start by just taking my little seedlings out, putting them in a protected full shade location.
[00:10:43] I'll put it out on my covered patio and I will leave the tomato plants out there. For a few hours, especially if it's really cold, just a few hours is plenty. Then I'll bring them back inside the next day. I will extend the time that they're outside under the covered patio. Maybe on the third day if the weather is cooperating, I can leave the tomato plants out all day and all night once that plant is able to stay outside full time, the next thing we start to do is we start to introduce it to direct sunlight. We start with just one hour of sunlight, and then we move it back into shade. The next step is two hours of sunlight and we move it back into shade. The top question I get about this process is what if I have a day that I am busy all day long and I don't have time to take it out , to the next step of hardening off, do I have to start back over at the beginning? No. Once you have exposed the seedlings to an hour of direct sunlight, you could just keep it at an hour of direct sunlight for three more days, and then resume the process of increasing the time that the seedlings are exposed to direct sun.
[00:11:56] Once it can tolerate one hour, then we bump it up to two hours, then 3, 4, 5 until our seedlings can tolerate six hours of direct sun. This is a really, really important process of indoor seed starting and something that a lot of people who try to do indoor seed starting on their own without, taking my indoor seed starting class, this step is often missed.
[00:12:19] Another term frequently used in the process of indoor seed starting is thinning. This applies to not only indoor seed starting, but also direct sowing as well. When it comes to starting seeds indoors, typically what we wanna do is start about two to three seeds in each cell.
[00:12:37] That's so that if one of those seeds doesn't germinate, we have backups. But if we have all three seeds germinate, we need to. Thin out the extra seedlings so that we only have one seedling per cell. We don't want three weak seedlings. We want one very strong one. So what we do is we snip out. The extra two seedlings that we don't need.
[00:13:02] By taking a tiny pair of scissors and just snipping at the base of those seedlings, we do not wanna pull those seedlings out. That's because all of those tiny, delicate root systems of those three seedlings are intertwined. And if we pull the extra seedlings out, we're going to damage those delicate roots of the one that we want to stay behind
[00:13:22] when you're direct sowing, a lot of seed packets will give you an instruction to plant more seeds than you will eventually have plants. In other words, it may say plant two seeds every four inches. Then thin to one plant every eight inches. The reason they do that is the same reason that we put two to three seeds in a cell tray when we're starting seeds indoors.
[00:13:50] You want to have backups, especially with direct sowing, because seeds can be washed away. Little seedlings can be eaten by animals. All sorts of different things can happen. So we sow more than we need, and then thin out the extra seedlings and leave a specific number behind
[00:14:08] our final term is top dressing. When we have a perennial garden, permanent plantings, and we'd would like to work on building the soil health, one thing we can do is top dress the area with compost, because we can't mix that soil up.
[00:14:26] Those plants are permanent. We can just top dress. The soil with a layer of compost, and that will help to build soil health as those nutrients kind of trickle down into the soil. Top dressing can be used when discussing mulch. Or fertilizer or compost, basically anything that we spread on top of the soil.
[00:14:52] Most commonly though, we will use top dressing when we're talking about compost, especially here in north Texas. Compost is the best way to build soil health. If we want to add compost to garden beds that are fully planted, we can just top dress with compost.
[00:15:12] Normally, when we're prepping a garden bed, before planting annuals, before planting vegetables, we want to mix compost into the top six to eight inches of soil to improve that soil. But we can get some of the same benefits that compost gives to soil simply by laying it on top of the soil.
[00:15:31] Sometimes you can buy a product that is mulch mixed with compost. A lot of large landscaping companies will offer this as a service to homeowners. At the end of winter, beginning of spring, they will top dress the entire landscape with this mulch compost mixture. So we have the benefits of both. We have the moisture retention and weed suppression that the mulch provides, and then we also have the.
[00:16:02] Soil enhancing benefits of the compost. I hope you learned something new today, even if it was just one thing. That is my goal for you, and I wanna let you know about some things that are coming up.
[00:16:16] Our next live class is going to be on Saturday, September 13th, and it is a brand new class. It is low maintenance gardening with perennials and self seeding annuals. This one's gonna be fun. The best time of year to plant perennials in north Texas is October.
[00:16:34] This class comes. Just at the perfect time, you're gonna learn about the best perennials for our area. And then I'm also going to tell you how you can make your annual flowers like your zinnias and your poppies behave like they are perennials. These flowers can come back next year without you doing anything.
[00:16:54] We're gonna talk about how that process works and the things that you can do to encourage this. Do nothing style of gardening, which is what I love to do, so that is on September 13th. A link to register for that class is gonna be in the show notes.
[00:17:09] Also in the show notes, you can get your own fall planting plan. It is. Everything that you need to know to plant things on the proper schedule for your fall garden. What to start indoors, what to direct sew, what to transplant, what color annuals you need to put in your beds, in your containers. That is also in the show notes itself. Thanks for joining me today. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to subscribe, rate, and review. This helps other gardeners find the podcast. And for more North Texas specific plant picks and tips, visit [email protected] or on Instagram at the Dallas Garden School. Until next time, happy gardening.
