Waiting for Spring
Any signs of Spring yet? Did you plant some early spring bulbs where you can see them from your favorite spot in the house? Another great place to spot signs of spring is by your entry doors. Along about this time of year is when I start looking for green bumps poking up from the ground seeking the warmth of the sun. Usually, I am disappointed until the end of January or first part of February, when the snowdrops start showing up, closely followed by the crocuses and early pastel violets.
The stores are starting to put their spring and summer garden decor out on display. Now is a great time to shop around and see if there is something that will add a bit of sparkle, whimsy or structure to your garden. There’s always somethng new that can replace something that has seen better days. If you wait too long, all the really neat stuff is gone and all picked over, and you are so busy planting, you don’t have time to shop for decor. Get out there and find those decorative items to accessorize your themed garden, be it flamingoes or classical statuary.
The catalogues are still trickling in, all hoping that I will place an order with them this year. There are some neat looking new varieties out there, so I just might. I will need to decide soon, if I can figure out where to put the new stuff if I buy it- now where did I put my plan?
Do you keep a notebook, or file folder full of plant information for your garden? I’m not that organized- most of it is in my head. I do save the plant tags, but not in any sort of system, just a kind of pile. There is something to be said for being organized, and if any of you have a good system, I’d love to hear about it. I know a couple of organized people who have a page for each plant, it’s tag, a photograph of it in their yard, and notes about when it was purchased, how to care for it, it’s history of any diseases, problems, bloom time, divisions, and any other bits of information they can put down. Martha Stewart probably does that.
Martha doesn’t do my gardening- its a good thing.
I keep a sort of mental list of things that need to be done in late winter or early spring before the growing season even starts: buy new fluorescent light bulbs for the grow lights, make sure all the fixtures work, get seed starting mix and potting soil, inventory seeds and get more if necessary, clear non plant stuff off the shelves, figure out when to start all the seeds so they are the right size for their outdoor planting time, but not too big, when they get hardened off, try not to start too many seeds, try to keep the house plants alive, stuff like that. How many of you like to start your own seeds in the house or have a greenhouse? It might be fun to compare notes sometime.
On nicer winter days, I go outside and besides looking for those spring bulbs showing signs of life, I do some pruning and training. You may know that I grow several kinds of fruit trees, all require some sort of pruning, sometimes quite severely as in the case of my Goldcot Apricot tree, sometimes just a little bit to control the growth pattern, like the Northstar Cherry and the Early White Giant Peach must be pruned yearly too for best fruit production. A fine day in mid winter is a great time to prune a fruit tree, although if I wait until the flower buds show signs of swelling, I can force the blooms indoors for a breath of spring. Apricot flowers especially are incredibly fragrant. And almost everyone knows how to force forsythia into bloom- one of my earliest memories is of helping my mom cut a few branches in time for forcing into bloom for Easter, then hanging colorful styrofoam eggs on the branches.
Already the days are growing longer, Spring is approaching slowly, almost imperceptively. Suddenly it will arrive, seemingly overnight (as it always does in Michigan) and burst into glorious color! Are you ready?
See you in the Garden!
