Good weather while most plants are still dormant is the joy of April gardening.
To all veteran and new garden enthusiasts, this is our moment. Spring is not cancelled, and gardens are waiting for us.
While it is still early, there are a few things to be done now that set you in good stead for the coming season.
First off, I expect this will be a great year for people starting up a vegetable garden. With good weather and our self-isolation we don’t have a lot of distraction.
An easy fix for starting or expanding a garden is to cover over grass now before it starts growing for the season. This will kill it off. Although there will still be weed seeds in there, it is a lot easier than digging up a patch of sod.
A thick three-inch layer of soil is all that you need to kill off most grasses.
Easier still, in areas that don't have to look pretty, I just use pieces of old carpet to cover the grass. You can also use cardboard or layers of newspaper, and then cover that with soil to keep it looking good, and to keep the cover from blowing away. Also, I save bags of leaves in the fall for this purpose, but I will lay some branches over the leaves so that they don't blow away. (Also Google lasagna gardening).
What am I doing these days? It’s drying up enough that I can clean out my garden, and the tulips and daffodils are starting to poke through — so I can make sure that I step around them. I’m removing the dried brown stuff and I’m seeing some weeds from last year starting up again. We had such a cold spring last year, that I just couldn’t bring myself to get out there, so things got a bit out of hand.
The winter frost heaves and loosens the soil, which is still moist enough that the weeds are easy to pull out, and their root systems are still small. This is the best time to weed, as long as you’re not packing down the soil because it’s still too wet.
You can also cover weedy patches in perennial beds, as I mentioned above, to give your flowers the upper hand. It holds the weeds back well but needs followup cleaning later in the season. It buys you some time if you can't get at a serious weeding job now.
There’s often some little gem to discover in spring cleaning ... Sometimes I’ve discovered a few leeks or some kale left from last season. I found little heads of radicchio in the garden this spring. Last year, I planted this new type of lettuce/green and will look for the seeds again. I plan to let one of the heads go to seed and hopefully remember to collect its seeds later in the season. It’s always fun to experiment.
This is also the golden moment to move around plants and shrubs and small trees before they come out of dormancy. It’s a great time for putting in a raspberry and blackberry patch, too.
In these weeks, I will be starting up lots of vegetable seedlings. Tomatoes, peppers and ground cherries can use a full eight weeks before mid-June planting. I like to start cucumbers, zucchini and melons about four weeks before last frost, since I find they transplant better when they’re small.
Happy gardening!
Caroline Cameron lives in Strathlorne, Inverness County, and offers gardening and hiking guide services around Cape Breton Island. She welcomes your gardening comments and questions at [email protected] and on Facebook at Nature/Nurture Gardening & Hiking.
