Tackle these easy tasks now and in early April; they’ll get your landscape and garden looking spiffy and off to a healthy start for the season.
Landscape
• If you garden, nobody needs to tell you that it’s been a record dry March. Drag out your hoses and sprinklers and water trees, shrubs, perennial beds and lawn. Water when the temperature is above 40 degrees so it all soaks in. Move your sprinkler head every 10 minutes around where your tree’s canopy ends (called the drip line). South-facing areas will dry out first. If temperatures are scheduled to dive, disconnect your hose and drain it to prevent freezing.
• Sharpen mower blades and replace oil (unless you’ve gone electric. Then just do the blades).
• Core aerate your lawn, with 4 inches between cores. Leave the cores on the lawn to break down (even if they do look like goose poop).
• Fertilize your lawn if you didn’t do it last fall.
Vegetables
• Enrich your vegetable garden by hand digging or tilling 1 or 2 inches of compost into the soil. Don’t dig in the soil if it is frozen or too wet (we should be so lucky). Remove the roots of weeds and old vegetables as you work. Vegetable gardens need yearly applications of fertilizer, so take the guesswork out of what your soil needs by Many area garden centers have ; the routine garden and landscape test is only $28. More: soiltestinglab.colostate.edu
• In early April, you can begin planting peas and other seeds outdoors. Soak pea seeds overnight to aid germination, then plant and cover with an inch of soil. Protect the seeds from critters and wind for a few weeks with a lightweight garden cloth, also known as a row cover. You can buy them at garden centers.
• Cool-season crops such as radishes, spinach, lettuce, arugula and onion sets can be planted outside now, with more plantings to keep your crop coming. (At higher elevations, wait to plant seeds outdoors unless you’re using cold frames.)
• Start pepper, tomato and eggplant seeds indoors now for transplanting outside in late May.
Perennials
• Cut back ornamental grasses and perennial plants, leaving about 3-inch stubs above the soil.
Bug watch
• Night crawlers can create lumpy lawns in the spring with their tunneling activity. But there’s no need to dig them up or spray. These guy’s are nature’s rototillers; they’re friends, not foes.
• Turf clover mites show up in early spring and may leave dead patches of lawn in warm, sunny locations. Supplemental water can reduce mite populations.
Be a joiner
• It’s a great time to join a plant society or garden club. You’ll learn, share and talk garden shop with other like-minded folks. Dues are reasonable and many have yearly plant sales. at coloradogardening.com/garden_ clubs.htm
Betty Cahill, a Denver Rose Society member, can be reached at bettycahill@ymail.com
