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Your plants are ready to start growing, so help them out by giving them a shot of fertilizer. Roses need to be pruned first. Don’t worry about the fact that they are already growing. Cut out any dead, weak and crossing branches. Look for the big, healthy basal canes that formed last year and remove any old wood that is interfering with them. Then prune what is left down to 12-18 inches. Climbers bloom on year-old wood, so wait to prune them until after bloom.
Clean up dead leaves and debris in your flowerbed. Summer-blooming perennials can be divided. If you don’t need them, pot them up and give them to friends and neighbors. While you are working, be on the lookout for slugs and slug eggs. If you get rid of that cluster of pearly white eggs now, you will have fewer chewed leaves later.
Start cool-season transplants (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and lettuce) under lights, if you haven’t already. Inexpensive shop lights suspended over seed trays work well. You don’t need expensive full-spectrum bulbs; plain cool white fluorescent bulbs are fine.
In about three weeks you can move them to a protected place outside during the day, bringing them in at night. After a week of this treatment, leave them out in a protected spot and then plant them when you get the soil prepared.
Growing transplants in the house decreases the seed-to-harvest time on most crops in the early part of the season. By the time your first crops are getting hardened off, you can use the lights to start tomatoes, peppers and other warm-season crops.
When your garden soil dries enough, dig it deeply and add compost and fertilizer. If you planted a cover crop in the fall, turn it under and let it decompose for a couple of weeks before planting. You can sow peas, onions, lettuce, spinach, beets, chard, turnips and radishes directly into the garden.
Houseplants that are getting root-bound can be repotted to a slightly larger pot with fresh soil. By the middle of the month trim and repot any geraniums and fuchsias that you have been holding over from last year. Put them somewhere that they will get lots of light, but be protected from late frosts. Water and fertilize them to get them growing again.
I have just been potting up the geranium cutting that I took back in January. They all have a few roots and will be big, beautiful plants by time to put them into the garden. Geraniums are not usually planted out until May, so, if you want to do some propagation, there is still time.
Take a 3-4 inch terminal cutting, dip the base in rooting hormone and then put it into a wet peat pellet or a mix of peat and sand or perlite. Keep it somewhere humid or suspend a plastic bag around the pot, keeping the plastic away from the leaves. In a few weeks you will have brand new plants.
If you want a good-looking lawn this summer, it is time to get busy. First mow what has grown since you stopped for the winter. Then evaluate your turf. Cut out a 3-inch square with a sharp knife and look at the thatch layer. If there is more than a ½ inch of old roots and stems, this is your year to thatch. My lawn has some moss spots, so I will demoss and then rake out the dead patches. Aeration can also be done now and is probably needed, at least on high-traffic areas.
After either thatching or moss treatment, turf usually benefits from top-dressing with a thin layer of light soil mix and then over-seeding. Use a seed mix of fine-leafed fescue and turf-type perennial ryegrass. Wait for another month before fertilizing your lawn.
Think about adding
fruit to your landscape. Bare-root plants are available now for considerably
less than potted ones will cost later in the season.
Hortsense: Managing plant problems with Integrated Pest Management
