Posts Tagged Northern California
Make a Date With Your Roses
Have you pruned your Hybrid Tea Roses lately? Pruning your roses back by 80% while they are dormant is the optimal time. Not only will it produce tidier plants, but will stimulate new, stronger, better-flowering growth and eliminate the nasty old stuff that harbors pests and diseases.
DK Landscaping provides you a step-by-step guide to getting the best blooms out of these traditionally beloved plants:
1. Wait until your roses are dormant. If the climate where you live is moderate, roses may never go into full dormancy or lose their leaves completely.
Hybrid Tea Roses
3. Remove all deadwood by cutting out all unhealthy canes. This means dead, diseased or damaged growth. Roses are sensitive to winter frost and the rest of the year are attacked by dozens of fungi, insects, molds, and bacteria.
Remove Deadwood
3. Prune to ensure that the center of the bush is open for maximum air circulation. That is, cut out stems that fill up and cross through the center. Remove any branches that are less than the thickness of a pencil, and remove any branches that cross or rub together. Train the rose to grow outwards.
Create Air Space to Prevent Disease
4. Make all cuts above a leaf bud that points towards the outside of the plant. Make all cuts clean – not jagged cuts, as this will allow insects and disease into the plant and open it up to infection. Always prune to a healthy bud. Make sure your cut is at a 45 degree angle going away from the bud.
Cut to a Leaf Bud
5. To ensure your plants remain healthy, we recommend painting all cuts with a sealing compound because the plant is not actively growing and can’t defend itself as well against diseases and pests.
Sealing Compound
6. Your Hybrid Tea Roses should look like this after it has been pruned (v shaped).
Hybrid Tea Rose Before and After Picture
For the best results, DK Landscaping recommends pruning your roses before Valentine’s Day! So put on a long-sleeved shirt and gloves and grab some sharp pruning shears and make a date with your rose or give DK Landscaping a call at (707) 280-3632 to get your hybrid tea roses bearing the champion flowers that it was meant to be by spring!
Rainscaping Your Landscape
With the rainy season still in store for us in Northern California, it is vital that your landscaping have proper water drainage built in to the design. Without proper drainage, your home and landscape can suffer greatly. Not only can it destroy your plants, yard and your neighbors’ properties, but can lead to serious structural problems for your home and hardscapes, such as cracked housing foundations, water leaks, and flooded sump pumps.
To avoid the nightmare of rather expensive structural problems and flooding, DK Landscaping provides some solutions to poor drainage:
- Proper Grading: Grading (if surface drainage is possible) is often the most inexpensive and most effective solution to correcting an area with poor drainage.
- French Drains: A French drain is basically a ditch lined with rocks or gravel that helps drain water away from an area. French drain works on the principle of gravity, being slightly sloped down from the area to be drained to the area where one wishes to redirect the water. Excess ground and surface water percolates into the French drain and is directed away.
- Catch Basins: Catch basins are simply a reservoir designed to trap debris so that it cannot enter the drainage pipes. Anytime your source of water is above ground, a catch basin can collect the water so that it can be piped away underground. Basins are used primarily when grading is either not possible or when it would create an undesired/unusable space.
- Sump Pumps: Commonly used back East where most homes have basements. Sump pumps are sometimes the only way to remove unwanted water from a location. Many homes have situations where there is no way to drain storm water from their property. If you don’t have a slope away from your property or there is a lower area or sunken area, a sump may be the solution to get the water out.
The primary goal of proper drainage is to remove the water and put it where it belongs: on the street! So whether you are doing it yourself or hiring a professional landscape company, you want to make sure the proper installation methods are being used. If you don’t know what the above bullet points mean, you probably want to hire professionals… this will not only save you a headache, but money in the long run!
For more information and a free consultation on your drainage system, please contact Kathy Lee at DK Landscaping. Kathy is our QWEL (Qualified Water Efficient Landscaper) Certified Irrigation Expert. We are also a certified WaterSense Partner. QWEL and WaterSense are certified by the EPA.
