March Gardener's Calendar

Dave lists the gardening tasks you can perform in March to prepare for the growing season.

[Music Playing] Hi, I am David Epstein and welcome to our March Edition of the Growing Wisdom Gardener’s Calendar. We are in the Northeast and in the Northeast one of my favorite early spring bloomers is going and there we go, that is the pussy willow plant and that is the flower and it is blooming and it is a very early bloomer. This is the witch-hazel and this is then blooming since really in early February but as you get to early March it really comes in to its own. If the snow has melted, it is a great time to start to remove some of the mulch, some of the debris from around your yards from around your plants. You want to be very careful around somebody early spring bulbs like right here. I have some snow drops and we carefully removing the leaves from around the snow drop so as not to damage the very tender vegetation which might be there. Start pruning some of the summer flowering shrubs, if you start trimming and pruning your spring flowering shrubs, for example along the dendron, you would not have any blossoms this spring. You will cut them off. It is a good idea to transplant your indoor house plants. Move them into larger pots if they need to. That is because in another few weeks, they are really going to start to put out a lot of spring growth and it is a great idea to have them in their new home before that starts to happen. If you live in an area where the snow is gone and your grass is beginning to dry out, how about applying corn gluten. Corn gluten will stop crab grass as well as other weeds from emerging out of your lawn later on in the spring and corn gluten is a 100% organic. Cut back your ornamental grasses. Do not be afraid to go all the way to the ground level. You wait into April and May, what is going to happen is the new growth will start to come up and then you will have a very tough time cutting those grasses back. Quit down some organic fertilizer across the areas where you are going to plant. So, use some composting like that. Do not use any chemicals. But if you put down the fertilizer now, then it will have several weeks to work in the soil, so when you are ready to plant later in April and May, all the nutrients will be there. Also get your soil tested this time of the year, and then you will know what you need to apply during the upcoming year. I f you think that you are done with the snow, run your snow blower dry. Do not leave the gas in the snow blower all summer long. It is not good for you. You will tend to get dunked up and really hurt the internal parts of your snow blower. How about putting up a bird house? Put the bird house somewhere away from the feeders. Put it in a little nuke of the tree and then just wait and hopefully some will be moving in. If they do not move in to start their first brood, perhaps they will be moving later on in the spring and if you do not get anybody to move in. In the couple of seasons just move the bird house, it might want just a different area. So, we hope that this March calendar has been helpful to you. Come back every week for all of the great information we have for you here at GrowingWisdom.com.