The Spring Gardening Rush
Does anyone else feel like this last two weeks of warm weather has somehow put you two months behind in your gardening chores? Here in the northeast, temperatures were pushing close to 90ºF even in my mini-zone 5B. Plants that hadn’t poked their heads above the ground two days before were somehow in bloom two days later. Who could keep up?
Now that we’re back to something more like normal spring weather, we’re left with the fact that “May flowers” have already bloomed by mid-April. Still, we need to continue to feed our bulbs, shrubs, fruit trees, perennials, etc., and pick up the fallen branches and twigs before we can mow the lawn.
This is the kind of gardening circumstance where it’s better to just go with the flow, because the alternative is endless frustration. We simply can’t get all of those twigs carted away before the grass is “too long,” because it already is. Accept, in advance, that you can’t stay ahead of the weeding and you’ll feel that much better about how much weeding you’ve managed to get done. If you’ve only got 15 minutes to spare, prune out some winterkill, put in two tomato towers, transplant some strawberries, clean up a container, or sweep the porch.
While this year’s spring rush has accelerated the garden’s growth, there really aren’t any more spring chores than usual. So relax and take time to smell the roses – I’m sure they’ll be blooming any minute now.
Now that we’re back to something more like normal spring weather, we’re left with the fact that “May flowers” have already bloomed by mid-April. Still, we need to continue to feed our bulbs, shrubs, fruit trees, perennials, etc., and pick up the fallen branches and twigs before we can mow the lawn.
This is the kind of gardening circumstance where it’s better to just go with the flow, because the alternative is endless frustration. We simply can’t get all of those twigs carted away before the grass is “too long,” because it already is. Accept, in advance, that you can’t stay ahead of the weeding and you’ll feel that much better about how much weeding you’ve managed to get done. If you’ve only got 15 minutes to spare, prune out some winterkill, put in two tomato towers, transplant some strawberries, clean up a container, or sweep the porch.
While this year’s spring rush has accelerated the garden’s growth, there really aren’t any more spring chores than usual. So relax and take time to smell the roses – I’m sure they’ll be blooming any minute now.
