Planting
- Bare-root plants, including roses, are available now in local nurseries.
This is a great time to plant artichokes, asparagus, horseradish, strawberries, and rhubarb. - Bare-root fruit trees are available in local nurseries. Consider adding apples, apricots, blueberries, cane berries, grapes, pears, or plums to your home orchard.
- Order specialty seed from catalogs and check local nurseries and feed stores for seed.
- Cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower starts can be transplanted from mid-January through early February. Before transplanting, harden off seedlings by gradually increasing their time spent outdoors in the natural elements.
- Direct-sow onions, leeks, peas, lettuce, carrots, spinach, and radishes.
- Tomatoes and peppers can be started indoors or in a greenhouse. Use sterile pots and soil mixes in order to prevent diseases such as damping-off.
Maintenance
- Divide daylilies, Shasta daisies, chrysanthemums, and other perennials.
Start pruning roses, cane berries, deciduous trees, grapes, and wisteria. - Top dress asparagus and rhubarb beds with well-
composted manure for maximum production later in the spring. - Selectively prune native shrubs and trees. Wait until summer to prune chaparral plants like manzanita and ceanothus.
- This is the time to move dormant shrubs and trees to better locations in your yard.
- Finish pruning fruit trees, removing 15% of older growth for plums, apples, and pears; 10% for cherries; and 50% for peaches and nectarines, saving new reddish-colored one-year-old shoots.
Pest and disease control
- Apply a final dormant copper spray to deciduous fruit trees (especially on peaches and nectarines to prevent leaf curl and on apricots for shothole) no later than bud swell.
- Clean up fruit mummies and debris to prevent disease.
- Apply horticultural oil to fruit trees to control scale and mites.
- Move living Christmas trees back outside. Put them in partial shade at first to harden them off, then move them into full sun in a week or two.