Now that we are finally settling into spring, what are some best practices for tending our gardens and lawns? Hopefully your garden includes the wonderful native plants that support our native pollinators and birds! For those, you can cut back those long stems that have been providing a creature habitat and gently see how the young plants are beginning their new life cycle.
You may not need any new mulch as perennials love to spread out. If you do mulch, only use the natural brown mulch as the black and red usually contains some very strong chemicals — example of one is arsenic. Remember to keep the mulch away from the stems and bark. Otherwise it creates a wonderful atmosphere for disease and pests to flourish and that shortens the life of your plants and trees.
Using native beautiful flowers, bushes, and trees is our best choice for creating a necessary opportunity for our pollinators to travel from one oasis to another — supplying them with a diversity of food within their limited traveling stamina. Planning a garden that has an arc of blooming throughout the spring, summer, and fall is very important to provide them with constant resources. Any size garden will support them. It is amazing — once you plant, they find your garden!
As to grass, maintaining a 3″ height will shade out weeds and give those longer blades more access to photosynthesis — giving you a healthier growing lawn. Also — mixing clover in with the grass will fix nitrogen in the soil that then feeds the grass — a natural fertilizer machine! Lovely violets with their sweet flowers can be mowed and will keep coming back.
Good growing!
— Judith K. Robinson, Hopewell
