With this being Easter weekend and the time to remember renewal, rebirth, and living, take a moment to ponder your yard & garden. It maybe to early to start looking for strawberries, but it is a wonderful time to get other edibles planted in your veggie garden, and start trimming up those soon appearing perennials.
Veggies: If you haven't had a moment to prepare the soil in your vegetable garden yet, right now is the perfect time. I don't recommend rotatilling twice a year like some die hards do, but if you'd like to work some good fertilizer, peat moss, or other soil amendments in, it is by far the fastest way to loosen that winter hardened soil, and mix in your soil goodies all at once. If you've eaten too many of those Cadberry Easter Eggs, you can always turn your planting beds the old fashion way, and burn those calories at the same time.
Once your garden has been prepared, it's time to get all those cold weather veggies in. These will include peas (yes you still have time to get those in, if you didn't in March), carrots, beets, potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, and spinach. Any of your seeds that have "plant as soon as soil can be worked" can be put in right now. Don't worry about those Tomatoes and Peppers yet. Those have at least 6 more weeks.
One last reminder for those of you with irrigation: It's still a couple more weeks until our canals will be filled so make sure you have made plans to manually water your new plants twice a week, or when the top of you soil appears dry.
Perennials & Shrubs: Well you aren't limited to spring cleaning your house. It's time to get working on chores outside too. If you drive by my yard in the winter my perennials look horrible, and no I don't leave them unpruned in the fall because I'm lazy. Leaving things uncut in the autumn's cool weather helps them shut down for the winter as well as protect them for getting overly wet and rotting. All that unsightly foliage helps shed off that extra snow, and water that can damage them later, but spring is the time to start cleaning them up. April is the perfect time to do that.
Basic rules: If you are seeing shots of green coming from the bottom, trim everything back to the base. If you are seeing buds along the stem, treat them as shrubs. For a first spring pruning I try not to trim it back anymore than a 1/3 of it's height. There are many shrub out there that can take a more aggressive prune, but 1/3 is always a safe and healthy amount and won't completely decimate a spring flowering show.
Next Post: Roses and Tree Pruning
