Here is a small list of things that you can be doing in the landscape and garden to make 2026 a successful and productive growing season.
Spray any winter annuals that escaped your early fall herbicide application. Spraying herbicides now, while your warm season grass is dormant, is preferred over waiting until warmer weather later in the year. If you delay spraying and the weather warms up you can damage grass, even with approved herbicides.
Apply lime to gardens and other areas as needed. If you have large areas needing lime, see about getting someone with a spreader or renting one from a fertilizer dealer. If smaller areas need lime, using pelletized lime is the preferred method. Lime must be pelletized to flow properly through normal lawn or even small tractor spreaders.
Prepare the garden for cool season crops. If you like to grow greens, spinach, lettuce, or other cool season crops you can get the garden ready to plant. We recommend January 15 to March 15th for many of these cool season crops. These can be started from transplants or from seed. Be sure that tender transplants have been hardened off before placing them in the garden. These crops can handle cold, but they need to get acclimated outside of the greenhouse before a cold event occurs.
If you like to grow your own garden transplants like tomatoes or peppers it is just about time to start these as well. Things like peppers and eggplant require about 8 weeks to be ready to transplant. Tomatoes require around 6 weeks, and other vegetables are even quicker to start. There are some vegetables that we don’t really recommend starting indoors. Cucurbits like squash, zucchini and cucumbers are easy enough to grow from seed and don’t always transplant well.
Finally, this is a great time to start pruning fruit trees. Pruning fruit trees now has several benefits. This is not really the best reason to prune, but it is cool so you sweat less plus you can use the limbs to start a fire and keep you warm. You should focus on pruning out suckers, and water sprouts. Suckers are usually below the graft and arise from the rootstock. If you examine water sprouts you will see that they have very few viable flower buds and are mostly vegetative. Next focus on the fruiting wood and flower buds. By now on most fruit trees you can see where your flowers are going to be. Removing fruiting wood now helps reduce the amount of fruit thinning required after flowering. If you must do severe pruning, consider waiting a few more weeks closer to bud break.
For this and more information on garden chores you can visit our directory to find your County Extension office. County Offices
