December 2024

Curated by David Manger, Owner of Roots & Shoots Nursery

December Show Stoppers

Yaupon Holly (Ilex vomitoria)

This native evergreen shrub brings a pop of vibrant green that sticks around when temperatures drop, making it a standout addition to any winter landscape.

Female plants produce striking clusters of bright red berries that look great and serve as a reliable food source for birds. Birds typically eat these berries late in the season so you'll get to enjoy them for a long time until foods higher in fat and protein are gone and they look back to a dependable source for a meal.

Easy to grow: Drought tolerant, salt resistant, happy in most soils, fine with most light levels... EASY.

Factoid: Yaupon is North America's only caffeinated plant! Fresh berries make a fine enough tea - if you like the flavor of grass. Otherwise, roast the berries, then steep for 5-7 minutes and voilà!

Versatile: Yaupon seedlings are always a lovely choice. If, however, you have specific design goals, there are short, tall, skinny, bushy, and even weeping cultivars to suit your needs. They take trimming and shaping well to fit into any yard.

Citrus Trees

December is harvest time for us citrus growers. As the weather cools, trees slow their growth and focus energy towards the ripening of their fruits. As they do this, sugars concentrate and we're gifted with a burst of winter color and flavor.

We're near the climactic edge of citrus here in Charleston but with some mindfulness about selection, placement, and occasional protection, a bounty awaits.

My unofficial list of cold hardiness for citrus groups is as follows (most to least tolerant):
Satsuma/Mandarin, Kumquat, Grapefruit, Orange, Lemon, Lime (dies in freeze).
There are many varieties to explore, each with its own taste and personality.

Aside from harvesting, hold off on doing any maintenance (fertilizing, pruning, transplanting) until spring when chances of frost are over since our citrus thrives in heat.

Citrus trees make cheery gifts! If you’re a grateful recipient, the same rules apply as above so keep that puppy in the pot until spring.

Tasks To Tackle

Un-tackle Fall Clean-Up:

If you've already begun bagging your leaves, then dump them back out already! Leaves are valuable soil builders for your garden, providing shelter, habitat, and food for smaller garden creatures throughout the winter. Move them around your yard to suit your needs or build a new bed and smother out that unused section of lawn beneath your tree. Place leaves from the trunk out as wide as you can.

Pro tip: The wind is likely to blow around a thin layer of leaves so stack em’ deep and they’ll stick together and stick around.

Keeping leaves intact preserves creatures that may already be hiding inside BUT if it doesn’t work for you, then use your mower to mulch in place or hook up the collection bag to whip up a nice batch of compost.

Shredded leaves provide carbon ("browns" in composting) while any grass clippings provide nitrogen (“greens").

A brown/green ratio of 2:1 makes for fast and efficient compost if you thrive on a good formula.

When composting, too much carbon slows the process down and too much nitrogen speeds things up to the point where they may become stinky for a bit. Whether it’s too fast or slow, you can always adjust the speed with additional materials so don't fret too hard about the process.

Bugging out for good:

We all want to make it through the winter. Harris Teeter is right down the street, so it’s pretty easy for us to survive. It's a little harder when you're an insect.

Leaves, dead stalks, stems and seedheads are a haven for insects and give small animals like birds a place to feed and shelter in the winter. Many beneficial insects lay eggs or pupate in stems so leaving them until spring is an amazing way to keep lots of life in your landscape. It’s a practice I hope will be more appreciated someday.

If you can’t resist cutting back, here are some middle-ground ideas.
Cut them back to a uniform height of 12-18 inches tall. This will tidy things up and still preserve much of that core habitat.
Cut them back as you want BUT bundle them up with twine and hang them somewhere decorative outside or out of the way.
Make a bug snug. Celebrate your insect passion with a tower dedicated to them. Add cut plants, bark, and other features to keep the habitat often ousted from urban yards.

Reflection:

Find a calm puddle and give your reflection a good hard look in the eye. Keep staring until your heart is ready (or a neighbor spots you) for an honest conversation about landscaping. In your now completely open state, walk around the yard and take note of how everything did THIS year, good and bad.

Here are some points to ponder:

Look at plant locations before things go fully dormant and think about gaps, I’d like to fill in vs. crowded areas I’d like to space apart.
Observe how individual plants are growing into their bigger selves.
Who thrived?
Who struggled and should I move it?
Remember this year's blooms and decide if any months were lacking in flower or interest.
Did I kill any plants or animals in my garden this year?
Did I really need to?
What did I spend the most energy on this year?
Was it something I actually liked doing?
Is it an ongoing thing and if so, can I make it more sustainable or tweak my garden so I can give energy to other spaces?
Should I write down any plant names before I completely forget them?
Are there any fruits I wish I was growing?

Reflection is great but don’t feel like you need to act on all this stuff immediately. Winter is just beginning, and we have plenty of time for planning in the months ahead. I’d like to note that you shouldn’t be shy about transplanting this time of year.

My Favorite Tools

I love a nice hand tool, and I’ve used plenty that were pretty nice over the years. The following have made it to my shortlist of GREAT tools:

Serrated Sickle

Its sharp curved blade slices through stems, grasses, and vines while allowing for swift, one-handed cuts. I find it especially helpful in overgrown spaces needing big sweeping cuts, along fence lines, and to keep my hands out of thorny plants. Serrations in the blade help keep it sharp and cutting precisely.

Double Serrated, Predator Tools Shovel

Made of Chrome-Molly 4130 Aircraft quality steel, it's the strongest shovel I have never broken! Added heft from the steel combined with serrations on both sides of the blade shred through roots and let you shape a hole however you please. I appreciate a gimmicky-sounding description when it’s grounded in truth, so I hope you like it. They’re a little pricey but I've been giving mine serious elbow grease for the last 10 years and its hole count is surely in the thousands… still works like a charm!
Check out Predator Tools' Model 95.

Giving Natives Their Day

If you’re not on the native plant wave yet, here's my pitch...

From the traditional gardening sense, native plants offer everything you could want. Tons of different species are available in nurseries and come in thousands of interesting colors, shapes, sizes and forms. Aesthetically pretty gardens are easy, but the real beauty of natives is their ability to build worlds around themselves.

Plants avoid being eaten by producing their own chemical defenses and so the “food” they make stays locked away, inedible and unavailable to most of our food web.

As they say, when there’s smoke, there's fire and when there’s native plants, there’s native insects. Our local plant eaters have evolved to get around specific plant defenses and when they do have a meal, they ignite some magic. The minute plant energy food turns into insect food, countless creatures begin showing up to take advantage of their respective niches.

The garden pulses with life, shifting, and reshaping in an interconnected dance where energy flows and changes hands over and over and over again.

We may not be able to see energy itself, but we feel it in the garden’s rhythm, hear it in the hum of bees, and witness it in the flurry of wings around the garden.

To quote my favorite kids' book, Some Bugs...

"Kneel down close, look very hard, and find some bugs in your backyard".

Seriously, watching the tiny lives of insects unfurl is wildly fun and while December may not be an amazingly active time of year, I’d like to challenge you to spend some extra time in the garden.

Slap on a timer for at least 15 minutes and focus on the same patch of garden as hidden worlds slowly reveal themselves.

Curator's Corner

Hello Fellow HORT Members.

You may know me from Roots and Shoots Nursery where we specialize in native plants and southern fruits.

I welcome you to visit our West Ashley retail shop. I’m always thrilled to chat about gardening or simply show off our selection of over 250 native and edible plants.

We differ from many garden centers in that we try to keep availability, whether a plant is blooming or not, so you can put together a garden whenever you’re ready!

About 10 years ago, I started up my sustainable landscaping business with a tiny hitch on my Subaru Outback and a very rusty trailer. I spent A LOT of time searching high and low for native and edible plants to do my projects and slowly cobbled things together to complete my designs.

As business grew, so did my appetite for hard-to-find natives and when the owners of the little backyard nursery I shopped with expressed a desire to sell, I jumped at the opportunity. Roots and Shoots became my own backyard nursery but with erratic hours, it wasn’t quite a stable business without my landscaping work to sustain it.

After a few years, I finally worked up the confidence to leave the backyard for a brick-and-mortar location and I couldn’t be happier with that decision.

Today, we continue down an exciting path of twists and turns and our amazing team is fully focused on supplying natives and edible plants for everybody to get, whenever they’d like.

Even though we no longer landscape ourselves, we’re always here to help educate and inspire you to give your garden wings!

Dave

Dave pictured with his family Emily, Alby, and Sammy

Give Dave a shout here and share your thoughts on the December issue of The Vine.

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