Tending the Garden – January to June

Tending the Garden - January to June

If you are the type of person who loves schedules, makes lists and who has a life mission to organize your life, you will love this month by month garden timetable. However, if you are the type of person who feels overwhelmed by all the work you see in the garden and don’t know where to start, you will love it, as well.

January

• Prepare your garden plan for the new year. If it involves a new garden area, pull out some graph paper and map out the area and the plants you’d like to include.
• Take inventory of tools and supplies you have, while making a list of items to replenish.
• It’s a good month to learn something new. If you can’t get out to take a class, enroll in one on the web.
• Go through seed catalogs and websites and place orders. Be adventuresome, try a new plant or vegetable.

February

• Seed slow growing annuals, such as sweet alyssum, geranium, phlox, petunia and verbena. Start them indoors, where the climate is still freezing.
• Have your shovels, mower blades and other edged tools sharpened.
• Trim shrubs now, if you didn’t last fall.
• Call professionals to trim your trees, but don’t trim maple, dogwood, sycamore, elm or beech trees. These are “bleeders” and need to be trimmed when they are in full leaf.

March, April and May

• Fertilize flower bulbs when they start to sprout. Crocus will be the first.
• Pre-seed annuals and vegetables indoors, for later planting.
• Survey the garden. Cut back and remove any debris.
• If the last frost has passed in your area, plant pansies and other spring annuals.
• Spray your trees with organic horticultural oil after freezing nights have passed, but before leaf buds appear.
• Plant your new seedlings from your indoor seed starters.
• Mix compost into your garden soil to add nutrients.
• Start a compost pile, if you don’t already have one. Add vegetable scraps, egg shells, leaves and other organic material to the heap.
• Fertilize the lawn at the end of May

June

• Remove outside faded leaves of spring flowering bulbs, but don’t cut them at ground level until all the leaves have turned pale and withered.
• Begin harvesting peas, lettuce, spinach and other early crops from your vegetable garden.
• Plant Dahlias.
• Deadhead any early blooming bushes, such as lilacs, mountain laurel and andromeda.
• Start herb cuttings.
• Fertilize annuals, vegetables and fruit trees with a low nitrogen fertilizer.
• Mow the lawn, if needed.

See the second part of this article. Tending the Garden – July to December.