This perennial bed of salvia was looking pretty sad in August when the semester started. The flowers had gone to seed and the whole bed was looking pretty terrible. In late August I dead-headed the whole bed and the BAM! 2 weeks later looked like this. It pays to dead-head your flowers and stimulate the growth of new blooms.
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About 3 weeks prior to transplanting these stock seedlings were start life in the greenhouse. Statice (also known as sea lavender) makes a great cut flower and produce a beautiful purple bloom. They’re known to have long-lasting blooms and can be used for long-lasting arrangements. Statice is also a cold hardy plant and can be grown in the fall. The plants have established and are doing well. They’ve survived the heat and survived the cold so hopefully they’ll flower beautifully in the spring.
The asparagus was looking pretty sad. It had been affected by the “plague of Bermuda”. Much of it was looking pretty dead. So we performed an intervention by ripping out as much of the Bermuda grass as possible, then fertilizing with an 8-2-4 high nitrogen granular spread. And after giving it a deep watering, two weeks later it bounced back with vigorous growth as you can see in the picture. Depending on the needs of your plants, different fertilizers can be used to supplement your plants deficiencies. Since nitrogen stimulates vegetative growth, a high nitrogen fertilizer worked great for this perennial vegetable. If you’d like to increase a plants vegetative growth in a growing season a high nitrogen fertilizer will help do the trick!
This fall we’ve been received a significant amount of rain, with over 12 inches in October alone. That’s more than twice the monthly average for October. This has been having many effects on the productivity at the Howdy Farm. With everything being muddy we haven’t been able to till, pull weeds, or plant anything. The rain also caused significant erosion in parts of the farm. On the bright side, this showed us how we could improve the soil and prevent loss to erosion by mulching. We found that the areas that were mulched more heavily saw less erosion and provided walkways through the mud. Adding mulch is a great way to prevent unnecessary mud build up and keep your feet dry!
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AuthorI'm a Biological and Agricultural Engineering student that is adding on a Horticulture minor to indulge my inner plant geek! Archives
December 2018
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The Howdy Farm at Texas A&M University | John's Blog |