Matthew Moore: The days of below-freezing temperatures may finally be behind us. If you're like me, you might even have a daffodil trying to bloom in your yard. And according to Mariette Spiedel, now is the time to think about your garden and your plans. She's a master gardener — has been since 2017, when she became one with the Washington County Master Gardeners.
She says it's important to have a conversation with them about your garden, because an online search may not be based in science.
Mariette Spiedel: What's really most important is that we know the growing region and the growing zone that we're in. A lot of times you'll go to the box store, the nurseries, and you'll see plants that don't always grow where we are, but they bring them in because they're beautiful. So we can advise you on how to prepare your soil, know the nutrients in your soil and the proper plant selections for this very difficult clay chert soil that we live on.
Moore: We're here in late February — what to the layperson might seem like not the time to start thinking about your garden, start thinking about planting. But when you walked in here, you said now's the time to start thinking about this.
Spiedel: It really is. And it really starts with a soil sample. Getting your soil sample right now, because nutrients that you put onto the soil — which people call fertilizer — it's not fairy dust. It doesn't just immediately change the nutrients and the pH of the soil. It takes some time for those amendments to actually change the nutrient value of the soil. So the soil test is really important.
The second part is we jump to warm days like we're having today, and then we plant things when the soil temperature is not there for it. There are some cold-crop things that you can be planting — broccolis and things along this line that can tolerate 20-degree temperatures. But it's really important to know soil temperature and what's going on at this time of the year.
And sometimes we also get a little antsy to clean up our gardens when we still have insects that have overwintered and laid their eggs in some of those stemmy old dead coneflowers or some of your native plants and grasses. Grasses do need to be trimmed, but be patient just a little bit longer with some of your woody perennials, and leave the garden a little messy for just a little longer, for those insects that need that habitat before it's time for them to emerge.
Moore: So one part is taking the soil sample and doing it correctly. Another element — how do you decipher what the soil tells you?
Spiedel: That soil report will come back and it's really going to tell you the basics — what we call the NPK: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. And if you want to know more information, like organic matter or other things, there's a small fee of five more dollars to find that out. But you can go online through the extension and there's a fact sheet on how to read your soil report. Or you can call us up and we can tell you what type of amendments to place in the soil.
Getting a soil test back saves you a lot of money, because a lot of times people will put fertilizer on their garden because grandpa did — he put a bag of 10-10-10 fertilizer and a bag of lime. That's old standards. We don't necessarily need to do that anymore. You might not even need any fertilizer at all.
Moore: Part of the soil might be different depending on whether you're in a new construction home or a home that's been there for 50, 60, 70 years. How would that affect the soil?
Spiedel: New construction — we do get a lot of calls where people have new construction homes and they have plants and trees that are suffering and they're very close to the home. Consider the lime that was in the concrete or the blocks. If you have a block-and-field type foundation, those are going to affect plant health. If you have a high lime content in your soil, or if you're dealing with that red clay — that's your pad build. Red clay is dense, there's no pore space, and plants are like humans: they need oxygen. Organic matter adds pore space. If you don't have organic matter in the soil and know how to build the soil — which we're great at helping you do — then the plants are going to suffer. They're probably going to die for lack of oxygen, or what we call wet feet. There's just no drainage.
In an established yard, there could be, say, a walnut tree. A lot of people want to grow things under a shade tree or grow grass under a shade tree — it's very difficult to do that because plants need sun also. There are conversations about shade plants, and moss growing on the ground under trees can indicate a pH issue. It's all things that we can talk to you about if you're having challenges.
Moore: Folks can reach out over the phone — we'll have the phone number listed on our website, kuaf.com. They can also go to the extension website to get more information, and we want to encourage listeners to ask questions of the master gardeners as well. We're going to have you come back as we get closer to spring to talk more about what it looks like to prepare to plant your garden, to look at trees, to do that sort of stuff. If you have specific questions, let us know. You can send us an email with the subject line "Master Gardener" and we'll see if we can stump you.
Spiedel: We love it. A stumping question really leads us to learn more. We are not all knowing, and those questions that come to us that we don't know give us a great opportunity to research and be students ourselves. So thanks for the opportunity.
Master Gardeners phone number - (479) 444-1755
Mariette Spiedel is a master gardener. She joined me earlier this week in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio 2. Mariette will be joining us again in March, so be sure to submit your questions for her.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
