Gardening Tips for March from the UT Gardens: Spring is Coming, Time to Prepare
The weather is warming, the days are growing longer and our thoughts are increasingly focused on how to improve our landscapes and gardens. Jason Reeves, curator of the University of Tennessee Gardens, Jackson, offers these tips for coordinating a few of your outdoor efforts as spring approaches:
Evaluate your vegetable garden plans. Often a smaller garden with fewer weeds and insects will give you more produce.
Broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts,
lettuce, chard, onions and potatoes should be planted this month.
When night temps get above 40 degrees,
feed your pansies with a water-soluble fertilizer such as 20-20-20.
Pull or carefully spot-spray winter weeds in your landscape with Roundup. Doing so now will make the plant beds look better and prevent them from going to seed, therefore making fewer weeds next year.
Apply a pre-emergent herbicide to your lawn if you had crabgrass and other summer weeds in the past. The timing of application is important, and a good indicator is to do it just as forsythia begins to show some color.
Sow nasturtiums this month. Soak seed
overnight in water. Cover with three-quarter inches of soil.
March is a good time to shop for and
add lungwort (Pulmonaria) and Lenten rose (Helleborus) to
your garden. Lungwort is an early flowering shade perennial that often
struggles in the heat and humidity of our Tennessee climate, so be aware that Pulmonaria
longifolia cultivars and hybrids are much more durable. Good selections
are ‘Roy Davidson,’ ‘E. B. Anderson,’ ‘Trevi Fountain’ and-my favorite for its
vigor and heat tolerance-‘Diana Claire.’
Climbing roses should not be pruned
until after their first flush of growth. Now is a good time to tie the canes to
a support before they flush out with spring growth.
For additional gardening tips, visit the UT Extension website: utextension.tennessee.edu and click on the menu link to “Publications.” Enter the term “gardening” in the search engine. Submitted by Jason Reeves, [email protected]
