Is it warm enough to plant summer veggies?
Soil still too cold to plant tomatoes and frost-tender plants
The weather has been lovely, no other word for it, and there is a whiff of spring in the air. Are you as excited as we are?
But keep calm, we’ve still got a bit of winter to get through.
Here are some things you can do in the garden, and a few you shouldn’t.
• Don’t be fooled into thinking that spring is here. It’s not, and Mother Nature has a cruel streak, dropping some cold weather on us just after we’ve put out some frost-tender plants. So even if the home improvement stores already have summer veggies on the shelves, resist the urge to plant them in the ground. The soil still is too cold for summer garden plants.
• You know those weeds you’ve been ignoring? You really can’t ignore them anymore. They are just getting bigger and putting down deeper roots. With a few more warm days, they’ll be setting seed. Go pull them right now.
• OK, we realize that you’ve got the urge to grow something; we’ve got it too. So plant some seeds indoors and start nurturing them. By the time the soil warms in a couple of months, you’ll have some healthy seedlings to transplant.
• Now that the promise of rain seems to have vanished, you can start working your vegetable and flower beds in preparation of spring planting. It’s not a good idea to do that when the ground is wet, but unless you’re running your irrigation, they should be dry enough to do a little work, aerating with a garden fork and working some compost into the top few inches of soil.
• And while we’re talking about no rain in the forecast, we’ve been harping at you to turn off your irrigation, but you might want to turn it back on briefly. Check your plants to see if they need some supplemental water and don’t forget your trees.