GARDEN Q&A

The Post's Gardening columnist Adrian Higgins answered questions recently in an online chat. Here is an edited excerpt:

We have at least one bunny that likes to come around and eat in our yard. I'm fine with it as long as it eats the grasses and weeds, but I'd really like to keep it away from the vegetable garden. How tall does fencing or chicken wire have to be to keep the rabbit out of the raised beds?

With rabbits, the wire need be no higher than three feet, but the key is to extend it as a soil barrier. They burrow! This can be done by simply burying the wire a few inches in a trench or by extending it outward at soil level for 12 inches or so. Secure it with landscape staples or pegs. You can hide it with mulch. The wire may need replacing every two or three years.

If it ever stops raining, I intend to move my tomato seedlings outdoors. I need your advice on what size pots to put them in. In the past, we have used five- to 10-gallon pots, which seem to be much too big for the root ball, but I don't want to cramp them, either. If it matters, they are cherry tomatoes.

If you're growing tomato vines in pots, I wouldn't use anything smaller than a five-gallon pot, if only to prevent the stress of the soil drying out too much. For indeterminate varieties (most cherry tomatoes, I think), make sure that you have some system of staking or trellising devised when you plant.

Do you dig up and replace tulip and daffodil bulbs every year?

Daffodils are reliably perennial (in a sunny location), but tulips vary. Some big hybrids come back, but most do not return to flowering size, in my experience. I treat them as a luxury and yank them. Species tulips are lower-growing, earlier and eties in the past couple of years.

This year one of our azaleas did not produce many blooms. I suspect this is because it was pruned after the buds had set. To avoid this in the future, when is the best time to prune azaleas?

That would do it. The best time to prune azaleas would be the month after blooming, before next year's buds are set. Please avoid the sin of shaping and shearing azaleas into boxes, cubes, cones and other unnatural shapes. You can reduce the mass of an azalea shrub by pruning in a way that keeps a natural, layered and asymmetric profile.

I've never had luck growing cilantro (too hot? too humid?), but I am trying again. Should I keep it on a covered porch and give it plenty of shade? Any tips? It seems to go to flower in short order.

You might plant some cilantro (started, not seed) now and enjoy it for a month, but the heat will cause it to bolt. I grow it as a fall crop, sowing seeds in mid- to late August. It is much happier then.

I've got a few tomato plants in pots on my porch that I don't dare put in the ground until it gets less soggy, because we've had so much trouble with both early and late blight. Should I just give up?

No, absolutely not. The only concern is that the tomato transplants are stressed from the cold and being in pots too long, so you may want to get fresh ones. Do make sure that there's a thick layer of mulch to avoid early blight problems — straw is not handsome but effective — and pick off the leaves that show blight damage as it appears.