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April showers bring May flowers!...Don't let these rainy days get to you...start planting! And be sure to take steps to aviod over-watering. Nurseries and garden centers will have enormous selections this month. Try to stay with cool/early season flowers like daisies, pansies, and snapdragons. Later, you can add marigolds, petunias, and zinnas. You can also start looking for fruits to plant. A good place to start this time of year is with strawberries, grapes, and kiwis. Herbs will also do well if want to grow some of your own. Chives, parsley, basil, oregano, mint, and tarragon will do well with the cool mornings, but make sure to take steps to protect them, as well as other early plantings, if it looks like a late frost is on the way. Start growing all kinds of vegetables and flowers on your window sills, or under plastic. Getting a head start on the growing season is extremely important for some of us. Especially if you plan on growing your own corn. If you have a short growing season, you'll need the extra time if you intend to have lots of healthy plants around this year. Hopefully by now, you have alreaady started many of your own vegetable plants from seed, and you won't need to buy them from a local store. Buying packs of seeds at the end of the year, and saving for the coming year, can save even more money. For example, buying several packs of tomato seeds, and starting them in 3 inch pots the following year, will provide you with more tomatos than you'll probably need... unless you plan on doing some canning. In our local area, tomatos in 3 inch pots, and about 6-8 inches tall, can cost as much as $1.75 each! You could easily purchase a few different packs of seeds for .35 cents, to .50 cents each, at the end of the year, save them for next year, and plant enough so that you could sell a bunch down on the corner if you wanted to. Planting an additional 300 tomato plants and selling them for a dollar a piece, would give you enough money to bring in some extra soil or fertilizer, perhaps purchase a few new landscape plants, or even pay for a tune up on the roto tiller. They don't really take up that much room, and there's almost no additional time necessary to care for them... after all, you're just watering them. Try to come up with some of your own creative ways, to not only save a few bucks, but make some as well. There are many different kinds of lighting available if you really want to get things going. Everything from cheap flourescent lighting, to the more expensive lighting like mercury vapor lamps, high pressure sodium lamps, and other types of high intensity discharge lamps. Constructing cold frames, a hoophouse, or even a small greenhouse might serve your needs even better. If you are going to be planting a large garden, and with successive plantings, one of these structures will assist you greatly throughout your growing season. For your lawns, many of us will have moss to contend with. make sure that you remember to cut your grass a little shorter than you would otherwise, and then apply your choice of moss killer to the lawn. Remember not to cut more than 1/3 ofr the length of your grass at once. Once the moss has died out, if there are any areas that need replanting, be sure to get some good quality seed, and adress those areas. Most moss killers will also make your lawn very green, and cause it to grow fast, so make sure to cut it again before you apply grass seed. |
Healthy Nutrition Growing Herbs Recipes Winter gardening Seeds Artichokes Asparagus Beans Beets Broccoli Brussels Sprouts Cabbage Cantaloupe Carrots Cauliflower Celery Corn Cucumbers Eggplant Garlic Kale Kohlrabi Leeks Lettuce Melons Okra Onions Peas Peppers Potatoes Pumpkins Squash Sunflowers Tomatoes Watermelons |
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