Landscape Articles for High Desert by Master Gardener Margo Murdock
Approved & Prohibited Plants List
DOs & DONT's in Planting Approved & Prohibited Plants List.pdf (03-5-24)
Weeds, Weeds & More Weeds
Weeds of Albuquerque
Below is a document created by High Desert resident Margo Murdock that will help you identify weeds that are common in our city.
Weeds of High Desert
Below is a pdf created by High Desert resident Margo Murdock that will help you learn more about weeds in our community.
Summer
High Desert in Bloom
The wildflowers have gone crazy with all the wet weather we’ve had lately. In fact you could mow and bale the blue grama this year it’s so tall.
Gardening in All This Heat
It’s been a hot dry summer and with weather like this, gardening is not a lot of fun. Here are some of the ways that I deal with the heat. First, I work when it’s cooler.
Fall
erizing Your High Desert Landscape
If you’re a lazy gardener like me, this is what you do in the fall and early winter.
High Desert in Bloom
The wildflowers have gone crazy with all the wet weather we’ve had lately. In fact you could mow and bale the blue grama this year it’s so tall. So if you’re enjoying this spectacular show of flowers in the medians, community entrances, and along the sidewalks and would like to know more, read on.
Best Time for Planting
Those of you who grew up in the East or in areas where “April showers bring May flowers” probably think this statement is crazy. But for areas of the country that have mild winters and hot summers fall really is the best time to plant, transplant, and divide. Here’s why:
Bulbs are for Optimists (1)
Any gardener that plants bulbs in the fall anticipating they’ll bloom in the spring is an optimist. It’s an exercise in delayed gratification.
Any gardener that plants bulbs in the fall anticipating they’ll bloom in the spring is an optimist. It’s an exercise in delayed gratification.
Bulbs are for Optimists (3)
Bulbs are the first sign of spring in the garden and sometimes the earliest ones can be seen peeking through snow. Most familiar bulbs are planted in the fall so now is the time to select and plant them.
Winter
Winter Landscape Care Checklist
It’s snowing outside, a difficult time to think about gardening when all you want to do is curl up by the fireplace and read a good book. While we cut back our gardening activities in winter there are still a few things we need to do.
Resurrection or Replacement?
While the cold snap we had this winter broke records, it really didn’t last very long and that makes it very different than the cold spell that occurred in 1971. Despite the short duration, the cold did a lot of damage to shrubs and trees.
Winter Gardening in High Desert
Why am I gardening in the winter you ask? Well I’m not out there working in the garden, but I am enjoying my garden. If your garden looks dead in the winter, you need to liven it up.
Spring
Spring Landscape Maintenance (2011-03)
Spring is the time of year when I do about 95% of my landscape maintenance. It’s not by choice. I’d spread it over the year if I could, it’s just that spring is the best time for the plants.
Wild or Weedy?
When is a landscape wild looking, and when does wild become weedy? In many cases it's a personal decision, so I'll give you my definition.
Preventive Maintenance in the Landscape
For many people taking care of a landscape is hard work. Are they ways to design and install a landscape that can reduce the work load and leave you time for the gardening you want to do rather than have to do? The answer is yes.
April-Spring Landscape Maintenance
Spring is the time of year when I do about 95% of my landscape maintenance. It’s not by choice. I’d spread it over the year if I could, it’s just that spring is the best time for the plants.
Water
It's a Drought - What Can We Do?
In spite of the recent rains our long term prognosis is still for the drought to continue. Even with the rains, plants do not recover from the heat stress quickly, especially trees.
Making The Best Use of Water
When it gets really hot i.e. when temperatures hover in the upper 90’s, we need to water more frequently. One way to cool off plants without increasing your watering frequency is to spray the leaves in the early morning using a hose.
Irrigation 101...or How Much Should I Water?
The hardest gardening question I get asked when I work the gardening question Hotline is how much should I water my <insert your plant name here>?
General Gardening
Browsing the Catalogs
At this time of year I’m not doing much in the garden so it’s a good time to shop for seeds and plants. The following are the catalogs or retail outlets I personally use – this is not an official endorsement from Master Gardeners.
Controlling Unwanted Critters
When you live on the edge of open space it’s impossible not to share your landscape with rabbits, deer, prairie dogs, pocket gophers, rock squirrels, skunks, mice, and nuisance birds. In most cases, the wildlife was here before we were and we encroached on their space.
High Desert Gardening
This is the first in a series of articles written for High Desert homeowners about gardening in what for many is a “foreign” environment. If you’ve gardened elsewhere, the four primary differences here are soil, water, wind, and sun.
How Safe are Herbicides & Pesticides?
The idea for this article came from the recent concern about weed spraying in my neighborhood. To understand the level of danger you need to be able to read and interpret the label on the product. Note, however, that in most situations most of the risk is to the person doing the application – in a residential situation that may be you.
How to Select Plants
You are heading out the door to buy plants because:
1. You just received a design for your new landscape, or
2. You had some plants in your landscape that died, or
3. You want a different look for your landscape.
Planting ~ Pretty Basic?
Last issue I talked about “Selecting the Right Plant for Your High Desert Landscape”. This issue is the next step or Part II of the process – how do you plant the plant? Most people feel that planting is pretty simple – dig a hole, put the plant into it, fill the hole with dirt, then water it. And all of that is true, but you may still kill your plant because planting’s not really so simple.
Saving Our Trees
According to a recent Albuquerque Journal article we are in our sixth year of drought. Although many plants are suffering, in Albuquerque we’re losing trees the fastest. This is surprising to me because many of the trees are in residential areas and are being watered regularly.
Soil Gone Bad
At our home we have three small beds for mostly daylilies and some vegetables. The vegetables in the middle bed look stunted and diseased, an embarrassment for someone who’s supposed to be a good gardener.
Starting a Vegetable Garden
Why Grow Your Own
There are several reasons why you might want to grow your own vegetables. These are my reasons. Freshness – you can pick your vegetables the same day you eat them
To Amend or Not to Amend?
This question came up recently and I thought it was a good one. Our soil is very low in organic matter so to grow healthier looking plants do we need to add soil amendments/organic matter? And if we do, what’s the best amendment to use?
Tools for the Gardener
With a friend of mine I’ve taken over management of the Garden Shop at the Albuquerque Garden Center. This has given me a chance to think of the products and books I think are worth buying and at the same time it has given me a topic to cover in this article.
Understanding Plant Tags
Whenever you purchase a plant it should come with a plastic tag inserted into the pot. When a plant doesn’t come with one, I’ve been known to “borrow” one from another pot. The tag contains lots of usefull information and I always keep mine.
Vegetable Gardening
There are lots of reasons why you should grow your own vegetables, but the best reasons are that they taste better, are fresher, and you know how organically they’ve been grown. With the possible exception of corn, vegetables aren’t native plants and so they are not adapted to the native soil.
Weeds of High Desert
Because of the lovely wet fall and winter we will see lots of weed seeds germinating. Expect a bumper crop of weeds this spring. Weed seeds like moist soil, light, and bare ground or newly disturbed soil.
Wild or Weedy?
When is a landscape wild looking, and when does wild become weedy? In many cases it's a personal decision, so I'll give you my definition.
Why Gardening is Local
I admit I am constantly annoyed by newspaper articles on gardening that are pulled from the wire services. I’ve read several articles that were written in San Diego or Chicago and what they recommended just won’t work here.
General Landscaping
Accessible Gardening
A simple definition of Accessible Gardening is making gardening available to everyone who wants to. We all have limitations - we just don’t think we have any.
Adding Color to Your Landscape
In the streetscape areas of High Desert, the original landscape designers favored trees and shrubs, but included very few perennials.
Aging Gardens
Many of the homes in High Desert are over 10 years old with landscapes that are now mature. So we are gardening in a different environment than when the landscape was installed.
About Turf Grass
For those of you with kids or pets turf grass is probably part of your landscape. Turf grass comes in two seasons/multiple varieties: cool season like Kentucky blue grass and fine fescue and warm season like buffalo grass and Bermuda grass.
Annual Maintenance Calendar
I thought a calendar of activities would be a good topic with which to begin the year and hopefully you’ll find it helpful. This
Choosing a Good Landscape Installation or Maintenance Company
This will be my second repeat column since I started writing the Landscape column in the Apache Plume. I’m doing this because it was probably the most popular and I got lots of feedback on it. I have revised it for anything I’ve learned since. MM
Choosing a Good Landscape Installation or Maintenance Company
Colorful Containers
It’s almost summer, except for that amazing snow we had at the end of April, and time to consider annuals in the garden. A great place for annuals is containers because their growth is limited and they’re usually easier to remove from the pot than perennials. I love perennial grasses in a pot, but you have to take an axe to the pot to get them out after the first year.
Creating a Wildlife Habitat
This is the only intentionally repeated article that I’ve written. Andreas Birk, the HeadsUp site manager for High Desert, suggested we try to gain certification of High Desert (common area) as an official Wildlife Habitat.
Diagnosing Landscape & Garden Problems
Problem diagnosis is similar to successful gambling – you need to play the odds. In diagnosis you start by assuming the most probable cause and as Curtis Smith used to say – look for horses, not zebras. Observing your garden to learn what’s normal and what’s not is the way to hone your skills.
Does My Landscape Look Dated?
We know that a house can get dated over time with colors, styles, materials out of fashion, and lack of upkeep, but does that happen with your landscape too? To save the suspense - the answer is “yes”. What are some of the signs of a dated landscape - ask yourself these questions to find out about yours?
Featured Plants
The Landscape Committee periodically reviews the Approved Plant List for potential additions. In this article I’d like to include some of newer plants we added and also some lesser used plants you might want to try.
Fire & Landscape
All plants are fuel and will burn under the right conditions. The question is: What can we do with our landscape to slow ignition and reduce the chance that fire moves either laterally or vertically - especially near a home?
A High Desert Landscape for All Seasons
Are you one of those people that visits a garden center in the spring, buys whatever’s in bloom, and never visits the center again unless company’s coming and you need some annuals for color? Well there’s more to enjoy in a landscape than just spring.
It's a Drought ~ What Can We Do?
In spite of the recent rains our long term prognosis is still for the drought to continue. Even with the rains, plants do not recover from the heat stress quickly, especially trees.
Ornamental Grasses
Ornamental grasses are four season plants, but my favorite season for them is winter. I like the color they add to the landscape, the way the seedheads look when backlit by the sun, and the way the stems move with the wind. Ornamental grasses also attract birds, providing food, shelter, and even nesting places.
Preventive Maintenance in the Landscape
For many people taking care of a landscape is hard work. Are there ways to design and install a landscape that can reduce the work load and leave you time for the gardening you want to do rather than have to do? The answer is yes. Even if you have someone else do the work, reducing time in the garden for the maintenance crew reduces your costs.
Problem Diagnosis Examples
Below are the details from the article titled Diagnosing Landscape/Garden Problems. I recommend reading that article first to put the information below in context.
Rain, Erosion & Rock Gardens
You may ask how did we get from rain and erosion to rock gardens. It begins with a story.
Resurrection or Replacement?
While the cold snap we had this winter broke records, it really didn’t last very long and that makes it very different than the cold spell that occurred in 1971. Despite the short duration, the cold did a lot of damage to shrubs and trees.
Seeding Native Grasses
Whether you were affected by the fire or just want a prairie as part of your landscape here are tips for being more successful when seeding. Installing sod doesn’t work if you want a mix of native grasses and it probably isn’t available anyway. Seeding can be tricky because there are a number of factors to consider:
A Shrub Pruning Primer
In a previous article I discussed why Box and Ball pruning is not good practice. In this article I want to discuss the right way to prune and how you should do the pruning yourself or how you should require your landscaper to do it as you oversee the work.
Top 10 Landscape Bad Practices
Like the late night comedy shows, I’ll start the count down with number 10 of what I consider landscape bad practices that I’ve seen in High Desert. Following each practice is context and why I think it’s a bad practice.
Water Features
It’s always been interesting to me that desert dwellers throughout history have been attracted to water features.
What's On / Off the Approved Plant List?
I didn’t live in Albuquerque when the Approved Plant List was first created, but I believe the initial intent was to limit the list to native plants that would look appropriate in the foothills. Because of the limited number of choices, over time this list was expanded to include water-wise plants that maintained the same look as the natives, but allowed for more color. Some plants were removed from the initial list because the City of Albuquerque prohibited them for allergy/pollen reasons.
What's Wrong with Cone, Box and Ball Pruning?
It’s difficult to find a commercial landscape in Albuquerque that isn’t pruning shrubs using hedge trimmers into geometric shapes, so why do I consider this “bad practice”? For me the primary reason is because it destroys the natural shape of the plant, but there are other less aesthetic reasons as well.