This week are you playing catch up with your lawn and garden?
The trees and shrubs are wanting fed again. You can feed your annuals weekly if you can keep up with the growth. Apply your dry lawn fertilizer and use a liquid weed treatment on a dry day. I have a feeling fleas are going to be a nuisance this year so you may want to treat your lawn with a multi action pest preventer and treat for grubs at the same time. Make sure to water your application in well to get a good start – unless Mother Nature continues to do it for us.
The precipitation lately has been good for the lawn though we still have not gotten enough o water in a newly established ball and burlap tree. It should not be a spectacle to you to see someone out watering in the rain – You think to yourself as you see him or her…. Hello it is raining…Duh! When was the last time you stuck your finger into the soil after it rained? Like never? Try it sometime and you will see if the meteorologist forecasts an inch of rain the soil will be dry down an inch. A root ball is how deep? As I have heard a commercial so eloquently state – It is not Horticulture science.
Since we are on the conversation of root balls – I have been asked many times this week if they should wait until fall to plant – I am asked this as we stand amongst the plants that are sitting in black buckets on gravel in the full sun. I say to you as I say to them – Do you think the plant prefers to be in the black bucket sitting in the gravel in full sun and exposure during the summer at the nursery or would it prefer to be planted in the cool ground?
Speaking of planting, so you’ve had to start the garden over, or you were late putting yours in – thankfully you missed the freeze – though, you did not catch the news that everyone who had annuals and vegetables wiped out by the freeze were rushing back to the nurseries to replenish their stash.
It always amazes me in the spring at the metamorphic changes that happens in the nursery from one simple Sunday to the next. One moment the nursery is so full of vegetables and annuals, the plants in back stock just keep flowing out from the back hoop houses. The next Sunday a customer at the nursery asked if Tom Dayton was cutting back on his plant orders for the spring. If she had only been there one week before that question would have been the farthest from her mind.
I myself, who works at the nursery every Sunday through the spring, had thought I would grab a couple vegetables I needed to replace because of the freeze. The nursery was so busy last week and there were so many vegetables I thought I had plenty of time to grab what I needed within the next week. As I arrived Sunday – It was a different nursery – if I had not been there last week I would not have believed how much plant stock had driven away from the nursery. So much for replacing my sore sorry cucumber, though I did adopt an orphan lemon tomato that seemed undesired by shoppers. We’ll see if he appreciates his new home.
In the meantime, look on the bright side – there are always seeds to get starts from or there is always next year.
Que sera sera!
