The March Garden Ramble

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with the members of the Remsenburg Garden Club. It was the first time I’d done any public speaking for a number of years, and it was a pure pleasure. I began my talk with a short story that shows the important link between Mother Nature and our gardens.

About a month ago I began to notice what I thought was a female red-tailed hawk perching in the trees above my property line to the west of the house. She sat silently, and I suspected she was waiting to see a gray squirrel pass below so she could pounce on it and have a tasty meal. I was wrong on both counts.

I was about to let the dog out for her evening routine but before she made it out the door a large, very large, brown bird took to the air from the same place where I’d seen the hawk up in the trees. Dangling from the talons on its left leg was vole, quite dead. The bird flew up into the limbs of the tall tree above. One foot grabbed the branch the bird stood on while the other kept the prey firmly in place, but all of a sudden, the bird, which was facing away from me, turned its head, and I was delighted to see that she wasn’t a hawk at all. It was a 20-inch-tall barred owl.

Now I’ve been birding (a birdwatcher and bird listener) since I was a kid, but in all my years, I’ve never seen an owl in the wild. I hear them all the time. I just never see them. What a thrill. I was giddy for hours. But as I thought things through something else became clear.

As the few inches of winter snow melted the trails of the resident voles were revealed. Voles don’t make tunnels like moles. Rather, voles burrow through leaf litter and lawn duff, leaving their trails exposed. The trails were all over the place and winding and turning in and out of the gardens into the lawn the trails covered 150 feet or more.

Remember that voles, unlike other rodents, reproduce year round, and there are lots of mouths to feed. So, in spite of my trapping and baiting last year, they seemed to be back in force. I set out a few mouse traps (baited lightly with a small piece of apple and some peanut butter) and waited. I didn’t catch a single vole, and there was no evidence of even a gnaw let alone a trapped vole.

Suddenly things made sense. The red-tailed hawk that turned out to be a barred owl was able to sense the voles under the light snow as their trails became more obvious. For weeks, it seems, she had been sitting in the trees picking them off one by one. The wonders of nature.

Now, consider the alternate outcome if I had been using a poison to kill voles. The owl may have eaten one or two, ingested the poisoned vole and probably died from being poisoned. It’s awful to disrupt Mother Nature’s food chain and even inadvertently kill a predator like the barred owl. Expand on this and think about what you put in your garden that might end up in the food chain and kill a beneficial bird of prey or other predator like a fox.

Last week I got an email from Timber Press about a newly published book, “Pansies” by Brenna Estrada (hardcover and paperback versions are available). I had a copy three days later and let my editor know that my column would be late so I could look at the book. I was surprised that the title was “Pansies” and not “Violas” because as the author notes early on, all pansies are Violas, but not all Violas are pansies. I hoped against hope that the book would give good coverage to Violas because many are natives. Sad to say, there is little said about the non-pansies. In fact, at the end of the book there is a note about two vendors to get seeds from. A glaring omission was Jellitto Seeds, which offers 44 varieties of Violas, not pansies.

On the bright(er) side this book does indeed cover pansies in depth, and for those of you who are interested in these annuals and biennials, the pictures and in-depth coverage of these wonderful flowers will certainly interest you. The book will be especially interesting for you if you do flower arranging and that seems to be one of the author’s driving forces and she does a great job at this task.

The pictures are simply fantastic along with the flower arrangements photographed to show how pansies can be woven into arrangements providing not only their happy faces and colors but their mild, spring-evoking scents as well. I would have preferred a book on Violas that featured pansies instead of the reverse, but clearly this book is aimed at gardeners, flower arrangers and designers and not a horticulturist who prefers Violas in my gardens and pansies in your pots and planters.

A few early spring reminders. Watch the area for the Forsythia blooms. These shrubs can burst into color any time from now through early April. It’s not only one of our signs that spring has truly arrived, but it’s a clue for controlling the weeds in your lawn. Peak Forsythia bloom is the time to apply a preemergent herbicide to your lawn. If you’re against the use of chemical herbicides there are organic preemergent products, but they don’t work as well as the chemical-based types.

Another consideration is that the use of the correct preemergent at the right time will and can dramatically reduce or eliminate the need for other herbicides on your lawn for the rest of the season. It’s a bit of a compromise for some property owner, but a wise one. If you have a gardener or landscaper that does this for you ask what they are using and maybe even go a step further and ask what weeds the herbicide controls. Some are limited to crabgrass and a few other weeds while others will control both crabgrass and some broadleaf weeds like dandelions. For crabgrass control the window for application of the herbicide is only a few weeks, though some (and they tout this on the label) can be applied later and are a bit more forgiving.

The other outdoor chore you can and should do at this time of the year is applying dormant oil to your selected trees, shrubs and roses. Dormant oil is critical on fruit trees as it smothers and kills scale insects, other insect eggs and it controls a few diseases as well. You have a choice on organic or petroleum-based oils, and they need to be applied on a day when the temperature is around 50 degrees (or higher) and there is no forecast for freezing temps the night after application or rain within 24 hours. Just as with the preemergent herbicides, the application of dormant oil in the spring will dramatically reduce insect and disease issues during the growing season.

If you have a small property or just a few short trees (dwarf fruit trees included) and roses you can do this on your own with a small compression sprayer. Coverage is critical so make sure you can reach the entire plants and cover all the surfaces to the point where the spray drips off.

As for fertilizers, hold off on most. Fruit trees seem to do best with injection feeding where you inject a liquid fertilizer into the soil at the drip line of the tree or bush. You can use organics or chemical-based fertilizers for this. There are also tree and shrub stakes for those less energetic about fertilizing, but this isn’t as effective as injection, but better than nothing. You can also “ring” feed if your tree or shrub is mulched to the drip line. Using this method you would use a granular fertilizer and ring it around the plant at the drip line at the proper rate. Foliar feeding at the point where foliage emerges and unfurls completely is not an effective way to feed plants.

My advice for feeding your lawn remains the same. Don’t! At least not yet. In spite of what your lawn care guy or landscaper tells you, your lawn should not get fertilizer until late April or early May. Earlier applications are a waste of money and a potential source of ground water pollution.

This year there’s one additional consideration for herbicides and fertilizers. We are still in a drought (though technically the least severe category). However, we’ve been in a weather pattern where even an inch of rain can evaporate in just a few days. Case in point is the recent “wild fire” in the Pine Barrens. It rained an inch just before the fires but most of that moisture was gone by the time the fire was at its peak due to high winds and rapid evaporation.

Applying herbicides and fertilizer in the absence of rain or irrigation after putting the stuff down will result in nothing. Both need moisture to become active. Watch the weather. If there’s rain in the forecast then take advantage of the opportunity. Also try to keep track of the amount of rain that falls unless you have irrigation. An inch or more a week is what to look for.

I suspect we’re in for another warm and potentially dry summer. The long-term prognostications through the summer agree that it will be warm. Precipitation is also progged to be “normal,” but I’m dubious, very dubious. Nonetheless, keep growing.