February Gardening in the Santa Cruz Mountains
By Josh Reilly
It’s February and garden columnists, gurus and boosters are telling us it’s no time to slow down. We are to plan vigorously, catalog our successes and failures, take photos of our gardens and mark them up with colored ink markers (as you might, when willing a hurricane to go where you want, rather than where it’s going). We’re admonished to visit botanical gardens and stroll the neighborhood to collect intel on what works and what might not. We are to observe carefully now, because in Winter we can see the garden’s “bones”, the rock, root and branch that forms the structure upon which lush foliage and eye-popping blooms grow. We are even asked to tread our damp, shady, unimproved side yards, to look for places to put yet more plants. I have done all these things many times, often with good results. But I’m getting exhausted just reading about them.
February in the SLV, is a perfect time to do almost nothing in the garden. If anybody asks you why you are reclining in your favorite chair, reading garden books (or napping with the book in your lap), send them to me. I’ll sort them out. I’ve been gardening on and off for 40 + years. I’ve learned and forgotten much along the way, but this I know. Rest and rejuvenation is not just OK, it’s absolutely necessary. That beautiful landscape you created, painstakingly, for years, isn’t an obligation or a burden, it’s a playground. It’s OK to put down the shovel, this month.
Still, there are things you can, or should do, if you just can’t bear to sit still for a month. By early February, your fruit tree, rose, vine and shrub dormant pruning should be done. Remember that dormant pruning stimulates growth, while Summer pruning stops it. This is why I use thinning cuts, rather than heading cuts, and sparingly, if at all, on most shrubs. Roses and fruit trees are a very different story, for another column perhaps next December. The point is to favor vigorous new growth and thin old, established growth. After pruning, and thus making room to work, it’s a good time to spread compost or organic soil amendments in beds and plantings. If you made compost from kitchen scraps, manure and green waste last summer, it should be ready by now. If your compost matures slowly and you’re waiting to spread it, don’t wait until things start leafing out. It’s a lot harder to work around all that new growth. There is little or no watering to be done in the garden now. Even though our last rain was weeks ago (as of 1/19/25), your soil should still be quite moist. Your thirsty potted plants, however, can use a drink. Check on your ferns, bamboos, Cymbidium orchids, Plectranthus, Pelargoniums (sometimes called “Geraniums”), Petunias, Violas, and anything you may have been tempted to plant since about October. New plants in pots with undeveloped root systems and recent acquisitions out in your yard should be checked regularly.
Now is a great time to plant Digitalis (Foxglove), if you haven’t already. These old-fashioned, cottage garden beauties should still be available in local nurseries. Digitalis will be in 4-inch (1 pint) pots and planted now, will bloom in June. Digitalis is a biennial. It lives for two years, blossoming on long shoots, the second year. Ask your nursery staff, to be sure you are getting one year old plants. You can easily start Digitalis from seed, but don’t do it now, unless you have a greenhouse or a warm indoor spot with a grow light. Better to do that in early Spring for next Winter’s seedlings, and next Summer’s blossoms. Digitalis is poisonous and unwanted by deer and gophers. Plant them right in the front yard, in a spot with a little afternoon shade. Then sit back, water lightly and enjoy Summer-long blooms.
Josh Reilly, aka Uncle Skip, writes about seasonal gardening from his home in beautiful Ben Lomond, California.
Featured photo: Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea L.) is a biennial or short-lived herbaceous perennial in the plantain family.
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