Springtime can be overwhelming. Everywhere we look something is calling out in need of attention. One of my garden mentors, Beth Nelson from Camp Joy Gardens, always said, “The garden is forgiving. If we don’t get it right this year, we can try again next year. Be patient with yourself.” Enjoy the time in the garden. Here are suggestions for where to begin:
- General garden maintenance
- Liquid fertilizer like fish and seaweed solution benefits plants more quickly in cold soil than the dry fertilizer.
- Control weeds before they flower.
- In the edible garden
- Time to pull back straw mulch to allow the soil to warm.
- Plant bare-root strawberries and raspberries
- Transplant vegetable starts
- Cover pea bed with floating row covers
- Direct sow root crops like radish, spinach, chard, lettuce, mustard greens
- Top-dress beds of perennial crops and flowers with well-aged compost.
- Landscape care
- Read our post about pruning flowering shrubs
- Replenish alder chips or arborist-chip mulch. Be careful with trunks of shrubs & trees—no mulch within six inches. (Mulch can keep the trunks moist and allow disease organisms to breed.)
- Add lime to lawns.
- Learn to appreciate the many benefits of weeds in the lawn—think polyculture!
- Mow grass leaving it about 2 1/2 inches tall.
- Hand pick & destroy slugs and snails. Learn to recognize snail eggs.
- Sprinkle Sluggo or other nontoxic slug bait
Vegetable Starts
Start seeds indoors if you can grow healthy starts that are sturdy and dark green. Inadequate light causes the seedlings to grow spindly and fragile. Indoor lighting is dim compared with sunshine. Even a cloudy day offers more light than a typical florescent grow-light.
Once they have germinated, place the seedling trays outside on nice days. At first place them in a protected bright spot and then a day or two later, set them in full sunlight. And a light breeze will help then get sturdier. Also, by placing them outside, and bringing them in at night, the seedlings have begun the harden-off process. Otherwise, if they are greenhouse grown and then directly placed in the cold garden soil, the young plants can go into shock rather than grow.
The goal is to transplant them to the garden when they have two or three sets of true leaves. A grey, overcast day helps prevent transplant shock. If all this is too much effort, buy the vegetable starts. You can always sow your own seeds later in the season. We are so lucky here in Jefferson County to have excellent seedlings available from Midori Farm and Red Dog Farm. They are available now at the PT food Coop and Chimacum Corner Farmstand. They carry an array of vegetable varieties that thrive here.
Pruning
Shrubs that produce vigorous replacement shoots are good plants to learn pruning. These flower on one-year old wood. If you only shear them, they never flower well. Also there will be a lot of thicker woody stems. Remove any crossing branches and weak or dead stems.
Proper pruning is a combination of thinning out—removing the branch all the way back to a larger branch, and heading back—what hedge shears are good for. Most novices just do heading back cuts. The problem is the plant grows into a dense hedge with just an inch or two of vegetation on the surface. A healthy pruning jobs increases the depth of foliage by allowing light and air in to the shrub.
Examples are flowering currant, mock orange (or Philadelphus), forsythia, kerria and flowering quince. Wait until the flowers are faded before pruning.
Making Lists
Springtime can be overwhelming. Everywhere we look something is calling out in need of attention. One solution is making lists. Walk through the garden and write down anything that needs attention. Next set priorities. Sometimes fifteen minutes is enough time to tackle a crucial task. To borrow a term from construction industry, consider making a punch list. Keep a running list of projects that require additional help or some expertise. At the end of the day, it is satisfying to cross off items. Of course, sometimes I enjoy puttering in the garden, skipping around in a relaxed fashion. This can be a form of horticultural therapy where enjoying the clouds skittering across the sky, or watching insect behavior is just as satisfying as accomplishing something.
Sustainable Garden Design 