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.
