With robins singing, trilliums blooming and a regiment of slugs and snails marching on slimy trails, March slips in like a lamb this time. The spring gardening crush begins. Here’s what to do this bright month of gardening hope and promises.
Bait before planting: Before you do anything in the garden, begin baiting for slugs and snails. Recent warm, wet days have coaxed them from their hideaways. Organic slug baits containing iron phosphate are effective, but not immediate. This means apply the material a week or so before planting out those tender, yummy vegetable and flower starts.
Begin fertilizing: By now roses, Japanese maples and a host of deciduous shrubs are popping their growth buds. Now is the time to begin feeding roses, blueberries, rhododendrons, perennials, spring flowering bulbs and the lawn. Timing applications just before a rain event is best. This is the month to fertilize the garlic patch as well. Applying fertilizer mixes composed of natural materials like alfalfa meal, bone meal, blood meal, soybean meal, manure and the like encourages beneficial bacteria and microbes to flourish. This means you feed the soil, which in turn feeds plants.
Prune: There is no end to pruning chores this month. Clean up the pruners, sharpen them up and begin cutting. Fruit trees, roses, blueberries and ragged perennials can be trimmed early this month.
Grow food: These days you will find a wide variety of fresh, locally grown starts of cool season vegetables at the nursery. Lettuce, spinach, kale, Asian greens, chard, potatoes and more await your soil and trowel. Hardy herbs include parsley, chives, rosemary, oregano and thyme. Too wet to get into the garden to dig? Try growing an early spring garden in containers. Also check out deals on blueberries, bare root fruit trees and strawberries.
Sow seeds: As garden soil begins to warm up and dry out, you can begin to sow seeds of peas, spinach, chard and onions. It is still too cold and wet to start carrots this month. If you do sow carrots early expect a long and erratic germination time.
One way to warm up the soil after sowing seeds is to cover the seed bed with a blanket of row cover. This will warm up the soil a bit and keep it from drying out on those sunny, windy days that are surely on their way.
Clean up: Weeding, mulching, pruning back spent perennials all top the cleanup list this month. Clearing the garden of useless clutter will deter slugs, snails, earwigs and sow bugs.
Terry Kramer is the retired site manager for the Humboldt Botanical Garden and a trained horticulturist and journalist. She has been writing a garden column for the Times-Standard since 1982. She currently runs a gardening consulting business. Contact her at 707-834-2661 or terrykramer90@gmail.com.
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