We are throwing out decorative greens from the holidays. Can I compost all these? There is the usual holly, boxwood and spruce, but I don’t recognize the berries.
The biggest danger could be the boxwood. If carrying spores of boxwood blight, boxwood cuttings could infect your boxwood, pachysandra or sarcococca. This is a highly infectious disease. In one case, infected cuttings displayed near a historical boxwood planting wiped them out. Bag up the boxwood and dispose of it in your trash. Unless you recognize the berries as native, just to be safe, dispose of those carefully, too.
For a few years, I have put amaryllis plants outside in the summer, fertilized, watered, and they successfully rebloom. This year I repotted them again and to date none show signs of reblooming. Bulbs are firm. Should I toss them? Also when I divided them, there were many little bulblets which I potted up. Will these bloom in the future?
Amaryllis can be kept going almost indefinitely as long as you let the bulb renew itself yearly, storing up nutrients to replace those it used to bloom. Bulblets require a few years to bulk up enough to flower. You need not remove your bulb from the pot and plant it in the ground each spring. This may damage roots. Bulbs can remain in their pot, as long as they get water, fertilizer and new potting soil occasionally. Between bulblets and mother bulbs, eventually you’ll have quite a show in one pot!
Amaryllis require a dormant period before they recommence growth and bloom. Bloom doesn’t naturally coincide with holidays, and timing varies somewhat between varieties, too. Give yours more time. For detail on care and rebloom, put ‘amaryllis’ in the HGIC website search box.
University of Maryland Extension’s Home and Garden Information Center offers free gardening and pest information at extension.umd.edu/hgic. Click "Ask Maryland’s Gardening Experts" to send questions and photos.
Digging deeper
Winter bark
Now is the time to appreciate bark. Overshadowed by flower and foliage the rest of the year, bark takes a humble back seat, but a winter walk turns up a surprising breadth of personalities. Take the paperbark maple with cinnamon-stick bark plastered on the trunk. Paperbark maple is a small Asian tree, not fussy about its site, but slow-growing and pricey. Bark of our native river birch curls and flakes with just as much vigor and more color contrast. Look, too, for the smooth velvet greys of tulip magnolias and beech, the crazy quilt spots and giraffe blotches of sycamore and London plane. Bark of everyday trees such as shag bark hickory and silver maple are all different, and a closer look at bark rewards with diamond shapes or corky texture. Not to mention colors from red to yellow, orange, and green. And don’t overlook shrub bark, it can exfoliate or curl, too.
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