Get Your Yard Ready for Spring

If you haven’t started already, now is the time to get ready for the busiest of all gardening seasons. This time around, make energy-saving the keynote of your pre-season planning and preparations. By doing so you’ll save money, and transform your garden into a place for relaxation rather than endless drudgery.

Maintain Your Tools

The best way of all to save both time and energy, including the personal kind, is to put all gardening tools into top operating condition. Hopefully, you remembered to at least winterize the lawnmower last autumn by draining out the gasoline. If you didn’t, the machine may not start because valves and fuel lines are gummed. Check your lawnmower and any other gasoline-powered garden equipment for such troubles. Have dull blades sharpened and spark plugs replaced or at least cleaned.

Give similar attention to all gardening hand tools. Sharpen dull cutting edges, repair or replace broken handles and discard hopelessly worn out or damaged tools, since these can be dangerous as well as useless. And speaking of danger, where do you store your lawnmower gasoline? Do you use an approved type of fuel container that is in good condition? If not, make buying a safe container a top-priority item on your things-to-do list.

If there’s any one thing that can make yard care tedious, it’s the need to trim, trim, trim. The solution is to simply eliminate the need for all the trimming work. For example, if you now spend endless hours clipping around flower beds, why not lay a brick or other ground-level border that will permit cutting all adjacent grass with one pass of a mower.

Tired of hauling a lawnmower up and down a steep bank? Perhaps it’s time to get rid of the grass and replace it with a no-attention-required groundcover such as pachysandra, thyme or evergreen ivy.

Do you have a stepping-stone walk or garden steps around which there is constant soil erosion? Next time, pack moss rather than more dirt into those spaces for truly maintenance-free results.

Feed the Lawn

Before adding fertilizer to your lawn, check the soil’s acidity or alkalinity. Do not add lime either. First have your soil checked by the local testing laboratory, or at least make your own test using one of the inexpensive test kits sold at garden supply centers. If the soil is indeed too acidic, the addition of lime may in fact yield a far better lawn with less fertilizer.

If you have recurring seasonal problems with crabgrass or some other pesky lawn weed, this time fight back early by using a fertilizer containing an appropriate weed killer. For crabgrass, it’s a pre-emergence type that deactivates the crabgrass seeds before they have a chance to sprout. Do not delay application; once the seeds start growing, this weed killer is ineffective and you have to try some other type. But one word of caution: choose weed killers judiciously and never use them when your lawn conditions do not require them. Remember, they are toxic chemicals that should not be distributed into the environment indiscriminately.

There are times when you might not want to add lime to a very acidic soil in which grass does not grow well. That’s if you have discovered the benefits of using moss instead of grass. The only attention moss needs is blowing dead leaves off it in the fall.

So if you find that moss keeps showing up in some parts of your yard, why not encourage its growth by adding more? Moss is easily transplanted into a garden if it can be found in abundance in a woodlot. If your supply is limited, you can stretch it considerably by breaking the mats into feed seed. Some gardeners mix a handful of moss with buttermilk in the kitchen blender, then sprinkle the moss-shake over the ground as seed.

Now Is the Time

If you prepare for the more obvious springtime chores soon enough, you’ll have more time to think and deal with other garden improvement problems that perhaps have been neglected too long.

For example, this year make a careful evaluation of the conditions of all trees on your property. A little pruning, patching of scars or the addition of some supporting wires could save money as well as trees.

Sooner or later some trees will become so damaged by storms or disease that they are beyond saving. Remove them promptly so that they do not fall on other trees or your house, and cannot transmit their diseases to still healthy trees. But why waste them? Cut them for firewood. Run the smaller branches through a chipper/shredder and add the chips to your mulch pile to help replenish your yard’s environmental energy bank.

Shrubs also need attention, including feeding with suitable fertilizers. For example, don’t just toss a handful of general garden or lawn fertilizer at the base of rhododendron bushes. Such shrubs need an acidic fertilizer to thrive.

After the ravages of winter, many things around your property by require attention. Frost heaves may have loosened fence posts, and perhaps new potholes have appeared in the driveway. Now is the ideal time to take care of such repairs.