Springtime, Clean-up and Prep. / Ready, Set, Grow

Springtime, Clean-up and Prep. / Ready, Set, Grow

After a long winter, heading outside to prepare your garden for a successful season ahead, is a pleasure!
Here are 5 tasks that you can do to start your gardening season successfully.

• Just before your spring bulbs pop up, clean up all the debris out of your garden bed. This includes, broken branches, old, matted leaves, last year’s dead annuals or whatever else. Then you can trim down the perennial foliage.
• Now, top dress your garden soil with a couple of inches of compost or manure. They all have a similar purpose, so it depends on what your preference is. We offer Mushroom compost (to increase soil quality and water retention), Shrimp and sea compost (adds more calcium and enzymes) and Sheep/cattle manure (popular choice for year-round nutrition). Sprinkle a granular or liquid fertilizer around perennials and flowering shrubs. For evergreens, like cedar hedges, a granular or water-soluble fertilizer high in nitrogen (like 30-10-10), should be applied in the springtime.
• Early spring is a good time for pruning shrubs and trees. Start with anything that has been damaged by winter snow. Summer flowering shrubs should be trimmed a few inches to allow for new wood growth. Examples are some Hydrangea, potentilla, rose bushes and Hibiscus-Rose of Sharon. Do not prune early flowering shrubs (spring flowering) that bloom on old wood (last year’s stems) These have already formed their buds even if you cannot see them. Examples would be lilacs, weigela, azalea or forsythia. These are best pruned and shaped once the blooming has finished in the summer.
• Now is the time to move or transplant perennials or shrubs while they are still dormant. Less stress on the plant means they will resume their growing cycle faster.
• Dormant oil sprays are used on fruit trees before the buds begin to grow. The idea is to suffocate insects and their eggs, nesting in the branches. The lime sulphur is added to kill any over-wintering fungal spores that have overwintered and are dormant. This will definitely cut down the population of harmful insect in your garden.