Before Getting Out My Garden Tools - Time to Plan

Michigan’s capricious weather in spring means my garden start date varies from year to year. I try to wait until it’s routinely 50 degrees out during the day so that I can give the beneficial insects and other creatures that overwinter in the garden time to wake up and begin to emerge.

Who knew those hollow garden stems held such life - such important life for our planet? For years I adhered to the gardening cleanup routine in the fall believing that an hour of work in the fall saved me three in the spring. When you garden extensively that kind of time saving is very attractive, although I never did quantify those numbers.

But as I learned more and more about gardening I came to realize that the ecosystem that my garden was a part of would do better if I waited. And frankly, I itch to be outside in the spring and I’m not as enthusiastic about garden cleanup in the often cold, gray and rainy days of November.

Yesterday I took a long overdue look at The Garden Professors blog. It’s one of my go-to resources for gardening information because it’s great science-based information. There I found an article entitled Fail to Plan or Plan to Fail? Planning for a Year of Garden Success.

For the vegetable gardeners reading this post and clicking through to The Garden Professors post as well, you’ll appreciate the wisdom in this article. I’ve given up on growing vegetables myself except for a few tomato and herb pots on the deck. Fortunately CSAs are readily available in our county and I’d rather have the avid vegetable gardeners grow my food than fight with the rabbits and deer that inhabit our property.

But The Garden Professors article isn’t just for vegetable growers. That’s the background of author John Porter so he devotes a large segment to that, but he also includes information that will help in planning the expansion of our ornamental gardens and also help me plan my gardening tasks for whenever the spring finally does arrive.

I’ve started a list of my 10 first tasks to tackle when the temperature is routinely 50 degrees outside. They include:

• Cleaning out one area where we have a bunch of daylilies and reevaluating that area for a different planting. This my require some evaluation of the viability of the traditional orange daylily or ditch lily, which has the capacity to take over certain areas.

• Cutting back my stonecrop plants

• Cutting down my ornamental grasses and moving some of them

• Cutting back my cup plant and moving it, if possible. This might be hard to do as native plants shoot down deep roots.

• Pruning the spirea after bloom. We didn’t get much bloom last year as the deer did a winter prune. This year I want to enjoy the beautiful flowers and then do a pruning that will be more of an “evening up.”

• Transplanting the Russian Sage that’s not doing well in its current spot, digging the Joe Pye weed and moving it to somewhere with more moisture and transplanting the plumbago to make an edging in a newly (last year) cleaned out bed.

• Fertilizing the peonies after I research the best options for fertilizing them. I’ve followed the old gardening mantra of using bone meal in the past. Now I need to see if that’s the best option.

• Keeping an eye on two small shrubs we planted last fall to see if they will restart after a tough winter.

• Cutting down some invasives that have sprouted on one edge of the garden.

• Removing the wild berry vines that are threatening to take over one hillside.

Envisioning what I want my garden to look like by mid-summer along with this task list will help me get started on this year’s garden plan. Meanwhile I’m going back to basics and rereading my literature on soil health and building good soil. Or as my mother would tell me, pay attention to the basics.