Category: The Gardening Guy

Start slowly and save your back

By Henry Homeyer

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It’s April, and spring has sprung. Or will soon. Winter always is a sneaky devil, coming back with hard frosts and even a foot of snow on occasion. There is much to do, but start slowly, not just for your back, which has been resting all winter, but because a week of warm sunny days doesn’t mean your soil is warm enough to plant. A soil thermometer pushed 3 inches into the soil should read 50 degrees before planting anything, even spinach and so-called cold-weather crops.

As you move around your garden you will probably notice that the soil is moist. If you are leaving footprints in the lawn or garden soil, stay off it until it dries out more. Otherwise you can ruin soil structure by compacting it.

You can put down 6-inch planks as walkways in flower beds if you are determined to weed or to remove leaves and debris while the soil is still a bit wet. But even then, be careful. There may be little green noses of perennials or bulbs lurking under the leaves and you won’t want to damage them by putting a plank on them.

I’ve had snowdrops up and blooming since March, as I do every year. By April I have lots of bulbs blooming: crocus, glory-of-the-snow, scilla or squill (a deep purple early bloomer), winter aconite (a bright yellow, short-stemmed beauty) and early daffodils. If you don’t have enough bulbs blooming, imagine where they might go, and put plant labels there for fall planting. A south-facing hillside bed will produce blossoms up to three weeks before a north-facing bed.

I plant 100 tulips as cut flowers every year. If you planted some last fall and have deer in the neighborhood, you may be disappointed to see them eaten just as they are starting to bloom. I prevent this by surrounding and covering my tulip bed with chicken wire before that happens. I plant my tulips in the vegetable garden each fall, and treat them as annuals.

Once your lawn has dried out, it will need a good raking to clean up the winter debris. I like to wait until the lawn has greened up a bit before raking. I don’t want to rake a dormant lawn as it would be easy to damage it with a brisk raking. Think of your lawn as individual plants growing very close together, not as one big green plant. They compete with each other and with crabgrass and weeds. A sprinkling of good compost will improve your soil, giving the lawn a better place to thrive.

I recommend reducing the size of most lawns. Think of a lawn as an area rug, not wall-to-wall carpeting. That will allow you to have a bigger vegetable garden and more places for native trees, shrubs and perennials that will support pollinators and birds. Do you know that caterpillars are essential food for baby birds? We need to provide flowers and trees that the butterflies and moths recognize and use — our natives.

I recommend raised beds for the vegetable garden, but you don’t have to build or buy wooden boxes for raised beds. When the soil has dried out, loosen it with a garden fork, and then use a short-tined rake to drag soil from walkways onto your designated beds to raise them up 6 inches or so. A 30-inch-wide bed is ideal — it’s wide enough for roots to spread far and wide, yet you will be able to reach all parts for weeding.

Adding compost to your soil every year will improve it greatly over time. An inch of compost works wonders if you do it every year. Buy it in bulk if you have access to a pickup truck, or buy bags if you don’t. And for my tomatoes? I always add a shovel of compost in every planting hole and stir it in well with my favorite weeding tool, the CobraHead weeder (cobrahead.com). Compost not only provides essential minerals in small quantities; it greatly improves soil texture and its ability to hold water in dry times.

Some people hate weeding, some love it. Either way, it has to be done. Start before the weeds get big. Perennial weeds like dandelions or thistles will already have deep roots. Annual weeds will be tiny but numerous. I believe the best tool for either is the CobraHead weeder. Its curved metal digging tip can loosen the soil around deep roots and help you pull from below with the tool while your other hand tugs on the top. Pull gently, slowly. You don’t want to snap off the root, as it will just start growing as soon as you walk away. Annual weeds you can loosen by scuffing the soil lightly.

As you plan your garden, think about buying organically certified starter plants and seeds. Why? Ordinary seed growers feed their plants with liquid fertilizer every day. That means that the plants don’t have to work as hard as organically raised plants to get the minerals they need. Organic practices promote longer roots to get the nutrition needed by the plants. If you are going to grow organic food, you will do best with organic starter plants.

Organic seed producers have to deliver seeds for plants that will not be protected from diseases and pests with chemicals. They have to be tough. Lastly, buying organic seeds and plants supports organic farmers. They are working hard to protect the environment by avoiding chemicals. Pay a little bit more if you can, and buy organic.

And remember: Gardening is supposed to be fun. Don’t work so hard you get blisters and a sore back. Garden a little every day.

Henry can be reached at [email protected] or PO Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746.

Featured photo: Dandelions and other deep-rooted weeds pull best when soil is moist. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

First, a few rules for pruning

Whether March came in like the proverbial lion or lamb for you, March is the time when you need to pay more attention to your houseplants. Instead of watering every Sunday, you probably need to water most things twice a week, except for cacti and a few plants that thrive in dry soil. But rosemary? It’s so easy to kill now. The sun is hotter, roots are growing, and they need more water. Don’t keep the soil soggy, but poke your fingers into the soil more often and make sure it’s not Arizona arid. A dry rosemary is a dead rosemary.

Although March is the time farmers tend to prune their fruit trees, I am waiting a bit. We still have too much snow to easily move around carrying ladders. Pruning experts will tell you that you can prune fruit trees any month of the year, something I have found to be true. But let’s go over a few rules for pruning.

Use sharp tools. A good pair of hand pruners, some loppers and a pruning saw are all you need. I don’t like bow saws — they can’t get into tight places. Know where to cut. Don’t cut branches flush with the trunk or a big branch. Each branch has a “collar” that should be left. This is the bulge where it heals. But don’t leave long stubs when you remove a branch. They will not heal properly, and look awful. Remove dead branches first.

Never remove more than about a quarter of the leaf-producing branches. Leaves are the engine that drive growth and flower and fruit production. Remove water sprouts each year or two. These start as pencil-thin shoots growing straight up, but will get big and clutter up the interior of the tree. Remove branches that are rubbing or crossing others, or are growing in toward the center of the tree. Remember: Sunlight should be able to reach every leaf. Open up the interior so this is possible.

March is also the time I start planting seeds indoors. Onion family seeds and peppers, hot and sweet, can be started now. Artichokes and cardoon I start early, but tomatoes I don’t start until around April 10. That will give them eight weeks to be ready to go outside in mid-June.

Actually, it is much easier to order onions as bare-root plants sold in bunches of 50, each a few inches long and ready to start growing in the ground in May. Johnny’s Selected Seeds and others sell them, and your local nursery may sell onions in six-packs, each cell with four to six seedlings. The main advantage to starting onions or tomatoes by seed is that you get a much wider choice in what you grow.

If you want to start plants indoors, you will need some lights. Yes, some people try a sunny window, but they generally get lanky plants leaning toward the sunshine. Kits with LED or fluorescent lights are sold at garden centers and online. I built my own, a simple A-frame wooden structure that has two plywood shelves and supports 4-foot lights. It can accommodate up to 12 flats of seedlings if I put some on the floor.

Next you need six-packs of either plastic (like the ones you get when you buy veggies or annuals at the nursery) or re-usable metal or heavy-duty plastic. In my efforts to reduce my use of single-use plastic, I have switched over to re-usable plant cells. Yes, they are more expensive, but they last forever. In any case, get bigger cells, not smaller ones. Your babies are going to grow in them for eight weeks or more and need plenty of room for roots.

You can buy seed starting mix, but if you do a lot of plants (as I do) it can get expensive. So you can mix the potting mix with good quality compost if you have it, or you can buy it. Seed starting mixes don’t have much nutrition in them, so adding compost helps. Or later, you can water with a dilute solution of liquid fertilizer, something like Neptune’s Harvest Liquid Fish and Seaweed Fertilizer.

You may wish to buy electric heat mats designed to provide consistent low-level warmth. This signals the seeds that spring is here, and gets them to sprout sooner and with better germination rates. Again, expensive, but they last forever.

Lastly, you can’t let your seeds/seedlings dry out. One way to prevent that is to buy clear plastic covers that fit over a flat of seedlings. Oh, and don’t forget to buy trays to hold your six-packs. This keeps water from getting on to your table or floor.

Lastly, in March I am reading gardening books and magazines and planning out what I want to do in my flower gardens. I recently got a preview copy of a wonderful book by my friend Jill Nooney called Bedrock: The Making of a Public Garden. Jill and her husband Bob Munger have been working on their property to develop beautiful spaces to try all sorts of plants. They bought the house in 1980 and have been working on them ever since. They turned over most of the land, gardens and Jill’s sculpture to a nonprofit to own and manage last year, but they continue to live in the old farmhouse there and work in the gardens.

Why read this book? It is relevant to anyone who wants to develop great gardens. Jill is a plant collector who has tried just about anything that will grow in a Zone 4/5 garden, and the photos illustrate many of them. The color photos are numerous and beautiful. It is full of design ideas, too. And she has an engaging writing style. I loved the book.

Spring is just around the corner. Get busy now — it will help prevent the mud season blues!

Featured photo: Metal planting cells from Gardener’s Supply. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

It’s flower time

By Henry Homeyer

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Here in Cornish Flat, this seems like an old-fashioned winter. Temperatures have been consistently below freezing, and the ground has had at least a light covering of snow most of the time. No deep snow, the kind that insulates the ground and keeps tender perennials safe, but enough to soothe the eyes when looking at the landscape.

But we gardeners are already thinking of spring. Fortunately, I planted many small pots of Tête-à-tête daffodils last fall and stored them in my basement, which stays at 40 degrees. The foliage is up now, and their roots are pushing through the holes in the bottom of the pots, so I know they are ready to bring up to the warmth of the house. I’ve been putting them in sunny windowsills, and many are blooming — and ready to give away. For me, this is a spring ritual: giving 4-inch pots of flowers to friends and neighbors.

If you are hungering for spring, you might consider going to a spring flower show. Unfortunately, many of the spring shows have given up. Boston no longer has its extravaganza, so the Connecticut show in Hartford is now New England’s big event. It has many nice displays and many great classes to attend. This year it is Feb. 20 to Feb. 23.

Then there is one of my favorites, the Vermont Flower Show in Essex Junction, Vermont, March 7 to March 9. It’s small enough to see everything in one day, but has lots to offer.

In Rhode Island there is the Home Show from April 10 to April 13, and it has a flower and garden portion, though I have not been down to Providence since the big flower show folded its tent in 2016.

For the travel-inclined there is the Philadelphia show, March 1 to March 9. It has been a spring tonic since 1829. The poinsettia was introduced to American gardeners at that first show, and Ben Franklin may have attended that year. Go on a weekday for smaller crowds, and be prepared to spend a lot but to have a lot of fun.

February is the month I go through my seed packets to see what I need to buy. Most vegetables and flowers stay viable for three years. Exceptions to that rule are all onion-family seeds and parsnips, so I buy them each year. I’ve found that shallots do very well for me and keep longer than onions in the winter, so I will buy new seeds and plant them indoors and keep them under lights starting in early March. Peppers of all sorts need a long time to get big enough to plant outdoors, so I also start them in March. Tomatoes I start in April, usually around the 10th.

This is also the time of year to pay attention to your houseplants. The days are getting longer, roots and shoots are growing, and they need more water. If you are trying to overwinter a rosemary plant, double the water it gets. A fully dry rosemary is a dead rosemary, and late February or early March is the time of year most of us kill ours. I admit to failing with rosemary by keeping to my weekly watering schedule.

If you have the mid-winter blues, buy yourself some nice cut flowers at your local florist. I prefer to buy from a florist, as they generally take better care of their flowers than big box grocery stores. Many years ago I went to the Boston flower market — leaving at 5 a.m. — with a friend who owned a florist shop to buy flowers for her shop. The flower market was the size of a football field and had every kind of flower you could imagine. What fun that was!

Some years ago the flower trade got a bad reputation because many of the flowers came from Colombia, South America, where the growers used pesticides liberally and paid their workers a pittance. But I believe that now many flowers in winter are grown in the States and done so with environmentally sound practices. You can always ask your florist where their flowers come from.

If you want cut flowers that last a long time in a vase, try alstromeria or lisianthus. Both hold up very well. Also excellent are chrysanthemums, asters, sea lavender and bells of Ireland.

Then there are a couple of gorgeous potted flowers that bloom for a long time at this time of year: cyclamen and Phalaenopsis orchids. The key to these is to minimize watering and to keep them out of direct sunlight. The cyclamen are cheap enough that you can compost them when they are done blooming (in eight to 10 weeks). Phalaenopsis orchids are more expensive but can be saved from year to year.

Lastly, this is a good time of year to think about your outdoor gardens and how you can improve them, come spring or summer. Start by looking out your favorite window. What do you see now that gives you joy? If you only grow flowers, the landscape is bleak.

Think about trees, shrubs and decorative grasses that you could add to the landscape. Would a nice miniature or weeping conifer fit into a perennial bed? A Merrill magnolia in the middle of your lawn could offer a nice shape and buds and bark that please you. It will bloom magnificently with large double white blossoms in April. It will give you something to look forward to. And after all, isn’t that part of the reason why we all garden?

You can reach Henry at [email protected].

Featured photo: These daffodils are ready to bloom on a sunny windowsill. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Coming up: more cardoon, better record-keeping

I’m not a big fan of unrealistic New Year’s resolutions such as “keep my papers organized and desk tidy,” for example. But I do like to spend some time each January reflecting on the gardens of the past year and making decisions about what I will do in the coming months.

Let’s start in the vegetable garden. In 2024 I planted about 24 kale plants of all colors. In 2025, I shall be more moderate. Yes, kale is healthy for us and freezes well, but I was lax in picking and freezing it in the fall, and wasted some. Shame on me. I use it mainly in stews and soups, or frozen in smoothies.

A new salad green I loved and which, unlike lettuce, never bolted or bloomed, is sold as dandelion. No, it’s not the dandelion we have in the lawn. It’s an Italian “dandelion” that is actually a different species. It is sold fresh in our Coop, I tried it and liked it, so I started some from seed indoors last March, a variety I think is called ‘Clio’ from Johnny‘s Selected Seeds. The leaves get to be 12 to 16 inches long, and they will regrow if cut, so I harvested it all summer and well into the fall and it never blossomed. I shall plant six plants again this year. FYI: It tolerates some shade.

Also on the vegetable front, I grew cardoon this year and will do it again. It is a very large leafy plant in the artichoke family. It does not bloom like artichokes, but you eat the midribs of the 3-foot-long leaves in fall. I chopped the midribs, boiled till tender, and baked in a cheese sauce. They tasted just like artichokes but created a lot more food.

This past summer was sunny and, for the most part, dry. We had a great tomato crop, and our flowers performed well too. I did have to water new plantings, as we got little rain.

We are out of sunny spots to add shrubs, so in 2024 we dug out a patch of goutweed — my nemesis — and planted nine shrubs and a Japanese red maple in an area of part shade, part sun. I was careful to water daily for two weeks, and then twice a week for the rest of the summer. The shrubs included two native viburnums and two mountain laurels, and three native hydrangeas, including a great variety for shade called ‘Haas Halo’ (H. arborescens). All did well.

The viburnums are Zone 5 and I have mostly considered our location a Zone 4 (with temperatures most winters colder than minus 20). But in recent years we have not seen lows of even minus 20 degrees, so I am willing to try some Zone 5 plants. Elsewhere I planted a kousa dogwood, a Zone 5 plant that I have tried and lost to winterkill more than once. The Stewartia tree I planted three or four years ago is also Zone 5 but is doing nicely. I’ll be 79 in April, and by gum, I’m ready to take some chances.

What else worked this past year? Opening our gardens to visitors. We worked hard in the spring to rid ourselves of weeds, sharpen edges of beds, and fill in empty spots. We opened our gardens on select days to various groups and invited friends for a glass of wine and a walk around with us in the early evening. No, our gardens were not perfect — none ever is — but these events were a great time. Try it!

I’ve had three honeyberry plants for three or four years now but have not gotten any berries as yet. The bushes (Lonicera caerulea) are in the honeysuckle family and the blue berries are very tasty, I’ve been given some. But so far I have not been able to pick my own. They have not earned their place. I shall tell them this spring to produce berries or they will be gone. I’ve been told that birds love them and will pick them before they are fully sweet and ready for me to eat. The berries turn blue, but are not ripe for a while after that.

The Catalpa tree I planted six years ago as an 8-foot-tall tree is now 35 feet tall and provides shade for us to sit and relax. It is a great tree, blossoming in July. I prune the top each year now to keep it from reaching its 60-foot-tall potential. It is a bit weak wooded, so I want to keep it from getting too big. The shade it provides encourages me to sit and relax in the garden, something I want to do more often in 2025.

I am saying a sad farewell to my Merrill magnolia that I planted in 2004. It bloomed reliably each year on my birthday in late April with huge double white blossoms. The shiny green leaves were gorgeous all summer, and the buds in winter look like pussywillows on steroids. It has five stems and stands about 60 feet tall and nearly 40 feet across at the crown. But it seems to have died last summer and unless it miraculously recovers in the spring I shall have it cut down. Sigh.

OK, time for one last resolution: I will keep better records in 2025. I just haven’t found the right way to keep them. I start a yearly notebook, and record some plants. But not all. I’m often too busy working in the garden and plan to do it later. My camera is a good way to record things and I take photos of everything that blooms. But I have literally tens of thousands of photos, and most are largely just organized by date. This year I will do better. Happy gardening, and best wishes for 2025.

Henry’s column appears monthly. Reach him at [email protected] or PO Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746.

Featured photo: Cardoon has silver leaves and is easy to grow. Start from seed indoors early. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Final garden chores to do before winter

Winter is fast upon us. The shortest days of the year are ahead, but gardening is done for most of us. That being said, in early November I still had flowers in bloom outside: My witch-hazel trees were gorgeous, twisty-petaled yellow flowers, even after a light snow and several hard frosts. And I still had a few blossoms on one of my ‘Knockout’ roses.

If you planted any trees or shrubs this year, make sure they go into the winter well-watered. We’ve had dry times this summer and fall, so a slow, deep watering is needed now. A woody plant’s roots are still growing now, even after leaf drop, and until the ground freezes around them.

I’m not sure why, but I saw very few Asian jumping worms this summer. Perhaps the hot, dry weather inhibited their spread. I think I only have them on one portion of my property, but I am being careful about the possibility of spreading egg cases. I like to chop up my fall leaves and save them for use in the garden, but I don’t do that with leaves in the area where I’ve seen those dreaded worms. Instead I just use them for mulching beds already infected with the invasive worms.

This is the time of year to think about protecting our woody plants from deer predation. I can’t afford to encircle our 2.5 acres of gardens with an 8-foot-tall fence, the best way to protect plants. And Rowan, our 4-year-old golden-Irish setter mix, helps discourage deer but he lives indoors and sleeps by the fire all night, just when hungry deer are marauding. Winter is when they want to munch your rhododendrons and other yummy things.

There are several ways to discourage deer. I have found that garlic clips attached to branches about 3 feet off the ground are good. I buy some called “Fend Off Deer and Rabbit Odor Clips.” These are little green plastic cylinders that contain garlic oil. They repel deer for up to five months. Unlike sprays that wash off after a hard rain, these really do a great job. I’ve seen footprints of deer that approached tasty shrubs, sniffed and walked away.

If you have had deer eat the lower branches of your yews, a favorite evergreen for deer, you can also protect your plants by wrapping them with burlap. Yes, tedious, but it is 100 percent effective. I have done it for years for a client.

Voles, chubby rodents with short tails, are common everywhere and love to nibble on the bark of young trees, particularly fruit trees. You can protect your trees by placing a cylinder of quarter-inch “hardware cloth” around them. It comes in 18-inch rolls, which you can cut with tin snips. Wear gloves, as it’s razor sharp when cut. But don’t let your tree engulf the wire, which it can do in three years or so.

A quick reminder of how to prune fruit trees: Start by removing any dead or damaged branches. Next evaluate the overall form of the tree: Is it a handsome plant? Can sunshine get to every branch? Is there clutter that should be removed? If so, get to those branches next. Evaluate the future of any branch in question: What will it be like in five years?

Branches on the outside of the tree that are headed back to the center of the tree should be removed. And of course, remove those pencil-thick upward racing water sprouts before they become big. Rubbing or crossing branches? “Off with their heads,” as the Red Queen would say in Alice in Wonderland.

It is not too late to plant spring bulbs. Selection in stores and online may be limited, but there is no such thing as a terrible tulip or disgusting daffodil. Daffodils are, generally, more successful than tulips as they are slightly toxic and not eaten by deer or rodents. But next spring you can surround or cover your tulip beds with chicken wire to keep deer from eating them. I generally plant 100 tulips in my vegetable garden each year to use as cut flowers and as gifts for friends and the elderly. I treat them as annuals, pulling the bulbs to make room for tomatoes or lettuce in summer.

If the previous owners of your house planted shrubs around the house, snow from the roof may slide off and break branches, particularly if you now have a steel roof. You can save them by making little plywood A-frames. Do this by screwing legs made of strapping or hardwood stakes onto lightweight plywood. Drill holes at the tops of the legs allowing you to connect front and back with a piece of wire so you can spread the A-frame out as needed, and fold it up to put away in spring.

Be sure to drain your hoses and put them away before winter.

Thanksgiving is just passed and I celebrated the harvest, as well as my good health, good friends and family, and living in a safe part of the world. I make a point of celebrating by serving vegetables that I have grown myself. This year I had, from my garden, potatoes, carrots, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard, kale, Italian dandelion greens and garlic. And we planned to make extra applesauce to give to our guests.

So do a little more work in the garden now. It will help dispel the winter doldrums.

Featured photo: A simple plywood A-frame will protect a shrub from snow and ice coming off the roof. Photo by Henry Homeyer.