What Else Besides Plants Should You Get This Spring for Planting?

So say there’s somebody out there who says, okay, I need to make a shopping list when I come to Rohr’s. Like right now, because I’m going to plant basil, I’m going to plant some herbs, I’m going to maybe get some kind of veggies, and even some flowers as well. What should my list consist of?

For the herbs and veggies, I recommend the Fox Farm products. Tomato Tone is by Espoma, and then there is one by Fox Farm called Tomato and Vegetable, it’s a dry fertilizer that you would put into the soil. It’s kind of similar to the all season but it’s organic. I really recommend planting it with the backfill of the soil. It’s got a lot of calcium and added nutrients and micronutrients that they like, because they’re heavy feeders, tomatoes especially. And it has a lot of calcium to help prevent blossom end rot, which is that black spot that a lot of tomatoes will get. So prevention is always going to be the best measure.

Sweet Peat’s another good one, or really any kind of bagged soil amendment, compost, manure. But Sweet Peat, I always recommend, because you can’t burn with it. You can plant right into that too, but it’s really good for your soil.

Then Grow Big is another good one from Fox Farm. That is a liquid. Grow Big and Cal Mag are two of the liquid fertilizers. So your herbs, your fruit, your vegetables, those are where we try to stay organic. That’s our company policy. Unfortunately, most of them are not grown organic from seed by the time they reach us, and by the time it’s reaching fruit, if you’re really concerned about that, as long as you’re doing it organically, I still feel it’s safe. So, that’s just one thing I always like to recommend.

So flowers, trees, and shrubs. Some things I’ve used at my own home this year, I use Milorganite on my yard, we got it up and growing. It actually is an organic product. We use that, and it creates a rich, dark green color to the grass, I mean, you can see exactly where I put it down, where it goes from my yard to my neighbor’s yard, kind of like a yellow lime green, or a nice, rich, dark blue green. And it doesn’t force a lot of growth, so it’s not growing super quick.

The other couple products that I’ve used at my house is, of course, the all-season fertilizer. I did my roses, my magnolias, my rhododendrons, things like that.

And then my magnolia had a little insect this year called scale, and it’s a bug that kind of attaches to the bark. Not a big deal. They make sprays that you can put on it, but I actually opted for the granular this year. I put a granular down around that, and I also put it around my roses.

Roses have a tendency to get this little teeny tiny green worm on the bottom side of the leaf, and it cuts holes, and it makes the leaf all lacy looking. Every year I’ve been trying to spray it with this product called 3-in-1, which is very effective.

And it’s something that you use later in the year once the plant’s actively growing. The problem is, I’m not watching them every single day. And then by the time I see them there, they have already eaten up a bunch of the leaves. So this year, I used the granular because it’s a 12-month release. I do not have to mess with this until next spring.

I use the all-season fertilizer on it, I use the granular insecticide. Now I’m done. I don’t have to worry because the granular insecticide is a systemic, which means the root system absorbs it. It runs up through the sap system of the plant and protects it from the inside out.

Now, anyone listening, never, ever use this product on something you’re going to consume. So no fruits, no vegetables, nothing like that. But for ornamentals around the house, it kind of makes things a little easier because you don’t have to remember to spray three times. It’s one and done. And the older I get, the more I like simplicity.