No fooling!
The April showers soon to arrive in our area will bring May flowers, but they can saturate the soil — and that can be a big problem when combined with the unseasonably warm temperatures we’ve been getting on the sunny days in between.
Where’s the problem, you ask? The almost irresistible temptation for us to go out and dig up and prepare our garden beds on those nice days — that’s a big problem. A firm rule of successful gardening and/or farming is that you should never “work wet soil.” Tilling or digging soil when it’s saturated destroys the soil’s structure and can make it impossible to work later in the season.
Instead, satisfy your outdoor craving by pulling weeds. Weeds are easiest to pull when the soil is saturated. Then mix those pulled green plants into your compost pile with lots of soil still attached to their roots. The lush greenery will heat up the pile, and the microbial life in the soil will help kick-start the composting action into high gear.
Spring bulbs: Hands off those leaves!
Spring bulbs are up and blooming, which means it’s time to make sure they return next year — with flowers on top and not just the leaves. The most common cause of spring bulbs not blooming is early removal of the leaves the season before.
After the flowers fade, do go out and snip off the seed head forming at the top of each stalk (just a snip at the top; don’t cut the stalk down low). But don’t cut off or tie up the leaves. They need solar power to grow the following year’s flower deep within the buried bulb. If you remove the leaves while they’re still green, that flower will not get the energy it needs to form; and the following year, you’ll just get leaves. (Yes, that is why your tulips never return. That and evil squirrels, of course.)
You can give the plants a gentle feeding after they bloom; in fact, it’s a great idea. There’s no reason to feed spring bulbs in the fall; they’re dormant then. Now is the time they’re working hard and hungry.
But again, don’t cut back the leaves until they lose their green color!
Only you can make April ‘the cruelest month’
T.S. Eliot, the man who wrote that “April is the cruelest month,” must have been a gardener, because these days are fraught with danger for people who love their plants.
Unseasonably warm sunny days make us want to be outside. Then we find pruners in our hands and say, “I’ll just ‘clean things up’ a little bit.”
Ah, but pruning stimulates growth, and fresh, lush green growth is not what you want when nights can still drop down into the 20s. So stay your pruning hand and just enjoy the wonderful show of spring blooming shrubs like rhododendron, azalea and forsythia.
When the show is over, you can (and should) prune those spring bloomers a bit. If the plants are perfect in size, just trim off the faded flowers. If they’re getting too big for the space, you can remove as much as one-third of the plant to reduce its size.
Spring pruning 101
Don’t let April be the cruelest month. Resist the temptations of these unseasonably warm days and wait to prune your plants until the proper time.
With spring bloomers, that’s right after their flowers fade.
Summer bloomers like crepe myrtle, butterfly bush, rose of Sharon (which is actually a hardy hibiscus) and true roses should be pruned two to three weeks after new growth appears. [Note: Do not commit “crepe murder” by cutting those poor plants down to a stump! Yes, crepe myrtle will survive such a pruning, but it will bloom late (if at all) and look awful.]
Ornamental grasses can also be cut back after the new growth has been evident for a couple of weeks; but maybe a wait a bit longer — that glowing green in the middle of last year’s brown has a great look to it.
And finally, if you protected a fig tree or rosemary over the winter, now is the time to remove their wrappings; but wait to prune away any winter-killed areas until early May. And with figs especially, we’re only talking dead wood. The less pruning you do now, the better the chance you’ll get a good crop of figs this fall.
A healthy birch does not need a haircut
Frank in Bowie, Maryland, writes: “I have a Heritage River Birch that’s about 18 years old and 30 feet high. A tree service recommended that the upper branches be trimmed because birch trees are subject to splitting near the fork in the base. Are they being honest? I can’t find any information online that recommends trimming.”
I can’t speak to their honesty, Frank — but I can say that these magnificent birches are not on the short list of trees that tend toward splitting, such as tulip poplars and silver maples.
Now, if there’s any dead wood up there, yes — it should certainly be expertly removed. But if the canopy leafs out fully, I can’t see any reason to mess with it.
Send your garden questions to Mike!
