Late March blog

What You Can Do Now:

Maintaining Your Garden Beds as Spring Bursts Forth 

As you walk your garden on these 75 degree days, you might be overwhelmed, as I am, to see the amount of weeds popping up.  The tricky question is,  “Which plant is a weed?”

I thought I would give you ‘easy to see’ tasks, or chores, you can do while you wait for your yard service, significant other or unlucky friend to come help you.

What to Gather to Start the Process

• Locate a pair of gloves that fit closely to your hand and fingers so you can grab hold of weeds.  Roots can go inches down in the dirt. I like to pull weeds when the soil is moist. You get a talent for knowing how hard or quickly you can pull  to be sure the root comes loose.

• Get a trowel, a  Hori Hori weeding knife or another one of dozens of weeding tools to cut out bigger weeds from their root.

• Find a pair of sharp bi-pass pruners.

• Get a tarp or bucket to throw weeds into.

Here are a few “for sure” tasks you can do.

1.      Prune off the top dead twigs of your ‘Nikko’ blue hydrangeas.

Nikko blue hydrangeas are in the background above.

Prune the dead looking stems down to the first few green leaves that have popped on the branch as in the left photo. You can prune lower if you are trying to create a nice shape. Beware.  Once you start pruning below the first few leaves,  you may be cutting off any future blooms .  Nikko’s bloom off of 2 year old wood.    Move along because it can take 30 minutes to do bigger bushes.  The right hand photo shows dead wood gone!

2.      Pull any chickweed that you see in garden beds. Chickweed is a fluffy round green shape with tiny white flowers this time of year. When the flower dies, it’s seeds rattle off.  You can literally hear seeds break free if you touch where the flowers just faded.  Chickweed grows profusely wherever it’s seeds fall.

3.    Dig or pull out vines which infiltrate other plants.  The blue flowering vinca below slowly moves into the green heuchera.

4.     Pull out any wayward sprigs or clumps of grass.

5.      Do not allow perennials to grow together and overlap at any point. It is easy to see the potential overlap now.  If you try to cut out any overlapping chunks of the perennials you have to stick your arms and hands through and down into taller plants. When plants get 3” or so tall, it gets hard to see where to divide.

The photo below shows how keeping each plant in its own space makes a ‘clean’ garden.

6.        Remove any plants covering the crotch of roses and other shrubs. There’s a rose in there somewhere. Look for the reddish/orange not-so-healthy leaf.

‘Enter in’ as the mystics say.  Go out for an hour at a time and start the maintenance process. Help prevent a ghastly weed/plant mess in April. You can legitimately feel smug that you helped your garden beds this early in the Spring.

Christie lives in Manakin Sabot , Virginia where she manages a 3 acre garden. Her blogs are written from her 35 years as private and professional gardener .