Garden Spring Cleaning To-Do List
Posted on | March 19, 2009 | 2 Comments
Spring begins tomorrow (specifically at 16:43:47 Pacific Daylight Time according to my handy equinox calculator), which means it’s time to start cleaning and preparing the various gardens for the seasons ahead.
It was a fairly warm and dry winter here this year thanks to La Nina, so a lot of plants that are normally pretty quiet in the winter have kicked out a lot of new growth early making the task more daunting this year than normal.
Here’s my to-do list for the coming couple of weeks:
- Re-cover and clean up the hothouse—The greenhouse film ripped in a couple places during a storm back in late January. I ignored it so the rips got bigger and the chickens got inside and made a huge mess. I’ll have to haul everything out, re-cover with new film and put everything back before I can start planting seeds.
- Clean and till the vegetable garden—Even though we can grow certain vegetables throughout the winter here (lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, peas, etc.), it takes some extra effort to protect them from the various weather extremes, so I let most of the garden sit from mid-November through March. Unfortunately, this means I get a fair amount of nasty weeds like nettles, mallow, and thistle that need to be cleaned out before I can till and set down the drip lines. Nettles and thistle get dumped into the green waste bin, the mallow and various wild grasses will go into the compost pile.
- Pick and prune the English and Spanish lavenders—These two grow quite a bit and bloom in the late winter. I’ll go out and pick the flowers (leaving a fair amount for the bees, of course), and trim back the foliage to keep them in their gardens and out of the path. If I don’t do it quickly, a couple of our ducks will set up nests in the lavender beds and I won’t be able to get in there until early May. I dry all of the flowers and foliage for use in my lavender soap which we sell in our online shop.
- Prune the roses—My mom always told me I should do this in January, but I’ve found that do it that early meant a lot of growth by late spring. Problem with that is we have a weather phenomenon called “May Gray / June Gloom” here that results in a lot of low clouds and gloomy conditions. Roses being what they are don’t really appreciate this and end up looking really haggard if I don’t give them a lot of attention. (I’m one guy and I’ve got two acres to cover. They’re not going to get the attention.) So I let them grow all winter and prune in early spring. That way when the sun comes out in late June they bloom like crazy all the way through October.
- Replace the drip lines in the upper gardens—Gophers breed in Winter, one of my wife’s dachshunds is a big gopher hunter and the drip lines get in her way as she digs the critters out. While I appreciate the dog’s efforts to rid the yard of those pests, she often does more damage than the gophers. A quick survey of the upper garden the other day revealed at least 8 chewed up lines. Since we get no rain here from April through November, I’ll have to replace the lines before the soil dries out.
- Clean up the water garden—Actually it looks more like a lagoon right now. The irises died back over the winter, the papyrus is going crazy and somehow a native river willow has taken root. I’ll need to clear all this out so you can see the water again and the lilies will bloom.
This list should keep me busy the next couple of weeks or so. Once I’ve got the spring cleaning done, I can move on to planting and the other stuff I really enjoy.
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March 26th, 2009 @ 6:34 pm
[...] morning I went out and finally got around to cleaning the pond of the overgrown plants per item 6 of my earlier post. And as I was on my my knees reaching into the iris to pull out the dead stems I came face-to-face [...]
April 22nd, 2009 @ 3:34 pm
[...] month I wrote my Garden Spring Cleaning To-Do List, a semi-annual of the ever mounting “Stuff That Needs To Get Done Around The Yard” that [...]