February Garden Chores In Texas

Welcome to February in Texas. You might think there is not much to be done in the dead of winter in your garden in February but there are lots of things that need to be done.

• If you have rosebushes, prune them and deadhead them.
• Start your tomatoes in the greenhouse or indoors on heating mats if you have not done so in January.
• Start cantaloupes, cucumbers, kohlrabi, lettuce, pumpkins, watermelons, and zucchini in seed trays or starter pots indoors.
• Get your garden beds ready for spring planting. Add compost and till it into the soil.
• Do a complete clean out of your chicken house and other animal houses.
• Stir your compost piles.
• Prune blackberry bushes and grape vines.

   

• Stir your compost pile and deep cleaning your chicken coop if you have one. Get all of the chicken poo over to the compost pile with dirt so the poo can compost. Chicken manure should always be composted before putting it in with your garden soil. If it is not composted, it will burn your plants.

  If you have rabbits, mix their poo directly in your garden without being composted. Your garden plants will love rabbit manure. If you are nearby, come to our store and buy two pounds of rabbit manure from our rabbits for just $7.95 a bag. We may not have any available when you visit the store. If we do, it will be outside of the store on the bottom shelves.

  If you have farm animals, collect the manure and compost it for your garden.

• Depending on your soil, you may want to put in raised garden beds. When we lived in San Antonio, our soil was rocky clay that was almost impossible to till through. The first year, our garden was not much because we broke two tillers trying to get through it so we could plant.

  After that, we put in raised garden beds and got beautiful garden soil from a soil company. Then we had some really good gardens during the twenty years we lived in San Antonio.

  If there is no snow on the ground where you are, you should plan and build some raised garden beds. They can be as simple as a rectangle on the ground using planks of wood to hold the dirt or as fancy as you want to make them. David once made a four tiered garden bed with the lowest one to the ground as the biggest. Each additional layer was smaller. We filled it with strawberries and it did very well for several years in our yard in San Antonio. Building it will be one of the good February garden chores your perform.

• We have sold a lot of seeds over the past month. Maybe you still have not ordered your seeds for spring. Lots of the popular seed varieties go quickly and we run out. So, if you haven't already, make sure that one of your February garden chores is to order your garden seeds for spring now.