Dan's Papers - April 24, 2009

It's time to get a new pair of gloves and some oil and sharpen the pruners and edgers and get moving in the garden. If you have not been exercising all winter, do a little stretching before your first foray into the field. Otherwise you may end up flat on your back.

Getting the garden prepared is often a long list of small chores. Starting with getting you and the tools ready may not be enough - a good visual survey is also necessary. Winter damage is usually the first thing to come into my field of vision. Broken branches littered my lawn and I didn't feel like tripping over them every time I went to and fro with the wheelbarrow. So as boring as that seemed, picking up sticks was the first thing I got to, and in the end it was satisfying. The dogs got to chase a few and the lawn looked a lot better when I finished. So the dead leaves piled in corners were next, this time I was bending and lifting but I had already warmed up with the sticks. While circling around I also noticed branches hanging from the trees and some dead box wood that were more the victims of ball playing with the dogs, but this led to a closer look at the hydrangeas. Fortunately, mine are protected from the wind, so they only need a little cutting back at the tips to keep them from reaching 8' high.

The piles of dead leaves reminded me that I needed to put Damminix or tick tubes out to keep those pesky insects at bay. And that made me think about the oak canker worm, the caterpillar that comes down out of the oaks on a web after having consumed all the leaves. Did I need to notify the tree company that a Bt spray was necessary right when they first started to emerge, rather than when they made a June barbecue impossible because so many were falling out of the trees? Planning ahead is so much a part of gardening, as anyone who grows vegetables knows.

I dug around in my own vegetable patch and seeded in some super sugar snaps, but I had to wait until April 1 to fertilize everything because of our new Suffolk County laws prohibiting the application of fertilizer between November 1 and April 1. But the peas never come up earlier anyway in my experience. I put down arugula and fennel seeds, cut back the dead out of the herbs and gave the wisteria on the fence a bit of a hacking, mindful of budding spurs. The fruit trees all got a pruning and some fertilizer. I will fertilize them again right after they bloom.

I was looking forward to putting out the pots and planting spring flowers, but first the irrigation system needed to be turned on. We have emitters in all the pots, so the head has to be strung through the hole in the bottom before we fill the pots with soil. A few leaks and holes from digging around were fixed at the same time and we set the clock on a spring schedule. I decided to rearrange some of the pots on the back deck and these had to be added on to the system. Irrigating the pots is well worth it if you consider that this one thing relieves me of the chore of watering all spring, summer and fall.

Once the big projects were out of the way, I could fill the pots with hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, pansies, brooms and hellebores. This was a lot of fun and with the ever-increasing sense of order the garden was becoming more and more enjoyable to come home to. But there was still more to do. Edges needed to be cut to separate the lawn from the beds, and peony cages have to be set up. The peony cage is one of the most useful items I have ever come across. They work for large grasses that tend to flop like Miscanthus variegata, sedums, which fall apart in the fall when the flower heads form, and for dahlias too. We prepped the ground for the dahlia tubers in advance, adding bone meal and bulbtone, and then used the peony cage as a marker to remind us where the tuber was planted in the ground.

Everyone's favorite chore is pruning. I had to take a sizable amount of wood off some old espaliers that had gotten overgrown, which was mentally challenging. It was so refreshing to look at them once they had regained their original form though. Hopefully there will be enough bees to pollinate them. And the roses needed the usual care, nipping them back into a vase shape with outward facing buds, removing the dead or crossing branches is another intellectual exercise of sorts. If only all my other chores were as satisfying as the ones I do in the garden.