What To Know About Opening Your Garden
Spring is in full swing so I reached out to Morgan Robertson, Vice President at Verdant Landscape and Design Inc. for some garden opening tips.
Check out Verdant Landscape and Design Inc. at www.verdantlandscaping.ca or follow them on Instagram here.
With the spring weather warming the air and melting the snow, now is a great time to start thinking about your lawn and gardens and getting the outside of your home looking its best for summer. When you get out there, here are a few things you should be doing to ensure a successful spring clean up.
First things first: We need to remove all the debris that winter left behind. Things like sticks, pine cones, leaves, and maybe some garbage that the wind blew in. When removing this debris from your lawns, try to use a blower rather than a rake. It is still a bit early to be doing anything to our cool season turfgrasses as they aren’t actively growing yet. Raking can damage our grass plant roots and blades. It’s best to touch them as little as possible. Also, if someone comes up to you and offers to de-thatch and aerate your lawns, run away. Our home lawns rarely need either, (every few years to never) and any company that offers to do this without properly analyzing the turf should be declined. Furthermore, these activities are best completed late August into September and not be completed in the spring unless it is absolutely necessary. Last point with turf is to not fertilize just yet. I know we’ve all seen the advertisements on TV and Facebook starting, and the bags being stocked at our local box stores, but like I mentioned before, our grasses are not actually growing and any fertilizer you apply will not be taken in by our grass plants and run off into our water system. Not only is this bad for the environment, it’s a waste of your money. We may think that the grass starting to green up and growing out means it’s actively growing and bringing in nutrients, but in all actuality, the grass is taking nutrients that were stored in the roots from last fall. The first application of turf fertilizer should be 1lb of Nitrogen per 1,000 square feet around May long weekend and not a moment sooner.
Now we can enter the gardens. The first step should be weeding your garden beds and hand pulling any unwanted plants. You should also cut back any perennials close to the ground, if they were not cut back in the fall. Remember to not cut back anything that’s green! Spring flowering shrubs like our weigela, forsythia, and lilacs will be blooming on last years growth, so we want to leave those until after they flower. However shrubs like Annabelle hydrangeas, Viburnum, and Ninebark can be cut back to encourage growth as these plants bloom on this years growth. When pruning most shrubs, you want to remove 20 – 30% of the oldest, thickest branching where your blooms and growth decreased. You want new growth so that you have vigorous shrubs full of flower buds. When pruning it’s also a great time to look through your garden to make note of anything that died over the winter and needs replacing.
Once everything Is cut back, it’s a good idea to edge your garden bed with either a flat shovel or half-moon garden edger, 4 – 6” down, to create a bit of a trench to keep grass from migrating into our garden beds as well as keeps our mulch in the gardens and not on the lawn. Before adding mulch, it’s a great time to add some compost. I prefer an aged manure loam, but any sort of manure will work. Add enough so that ¼” thick layer is applied. You can lightly work that into the soil if you want, but you don’t have to, it will work itself in over time. You want to till the soils as little as possible. The application of composted manure should be the only added nutrients your garden needs. No need to go out and buy any sort of granular or liquid fertilizers for your garden plants, save that for the annuals.
On top of the composted manure you can add your mulch. You should apply 3” of a shredded, natural pine or cedar mulch throughout the garden. It is best to avoid any dyed mulches. Natural mulches are great at supressing weeds, holding water for plants which is important during times of heat and drought, insulating plant roots which helps them survive periods of extreme weather, and natural mulches break down into the soil adding important nutrients and providing food for our microorganisms and eventually our plants. Dyed mulches are often made of recycled hard woods like skids that are dyed to make look better, and do not provide any of the same benefits that our natural mulches do.
Once you’ve completed these steps, you’re well on your way to a beautiful and lush garden that can be enjoyed all season!
