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A Cold Wet Spring

I’m tired of cold gray days, drizzle and downpours. My vegetable garden is so wet I should be fishing there, not gardening – though I am doing neither. Last spring we had hot weather early and our plants started off much too fast. Then a hard frost came that killed early fruit blossoms. Each year is different. Meanwhile, what can we do?

First, don’t worry about the fact that flowers are 2-3 weeks late in blooming. They will eventually bloom, and most early blooming plants are not damaged by a little frost, should we get some more, and we may. Last year I took pictures of my February Daphne (Daphne mezereum) in full bloom on April 4, and as of April 24 it still had not bloomed.

Don’t jump into your usual spring lawn and garden work yet √ or not unless your property is a lot drier than mine. If your shoes making dents in the lawn, or if you hear a “squish”, stay off the lawn. For flower beds, try using a 5-foot long plank to walk on if you must get in them to work. That will distribute your weight nicely. If you have two planks (each 6 inches wide), you can move from one to the next.

Rototilling now is definitely a no-no unless you have sandy soil on a hilltop. Grab a hand of garden soil, squeeze it with your fingers, and open your hand. Touch it lightly with a finger. If the soil does not crumble, it is too wet to rototill. Heavy clay soils hold water, and may never fall apart with a gentle touch √ unless you work in lots of compost. Rototilling too early can ruin soil structure.

You can, however, start seeds indoors now. I have about 300 seedlings started indoors, growing under lights. Lights are important. I know some gardeners grow a few tomatoes on the window sill, but growing plants without supplemental light generally results in spindly plants that are pale and reaching for the sun. A 4-foot, 2-tube fluorescent light will illuminate 2 flats (72 seedlings or more, depending on the size of the cells in the 6-packs). Lights are a good investment.

Keeping the light near the seedlings is important. I hang lights above the plants, keeping them 6-10 inches above the leaves and raising the lights as the plants get taller. It’s also important to let your babies sleep at night. Fourteen hours of light is plenty. It’s good to let temperatures in the room with the seedlings hover around 60-65 degrees, too and even cooler at night.

pruning

This is a good time of year to do some pruning. You can prune fruit trees and blueberry bushes now. Learn to recognize the flower buds of each, so you will know what you are pruning off. Apples and other fruit trees bloom on short (3-4 inch) fruit spurs that are more than one year old.

Fruit spurs

Fruit spurs are most commonly present on “scaffold” branches, those branches that extend outwards from the trunk at about a 45 degree angle. If you want to turn a small vertical branch into a scaffold branch that will eventually produce fruit, you can bend the branch by hanging a weight on it for a couple of months. Hang a plastic bottle on the branch, and add water to get the weight you want.

I recently attended a pruning workshop led by Bill Lord, a now retired UNH Extension fruit specialist. He said that older branches on blueberries that have no fruit buds this year probably won≠t have any in the future, and that you should prune off those limbs to stimulate new growth. The fat buds that will produce fruit are usually toward the tips of vigorous young branches – those 6-10 inches in length. Those branches generally produce the strongest buds. The smaller buds elsewhere are leaf buds. Bill said that each fruit bud can produce 5-10 berries!

This is also the time of year to get your soil tested. Call your Extension office, or ask Mr. Google where you can get it done. It only takes a few minutes to collect a sample, and a test can tell you much. Blueberries, for example, need very acidic soil (pH 4.0 to 5.5) to be productive. A soil test will tell you how much garden sulfur (approved for organic gardeners) to add around your plants. Blueberry roots grow in mats near the soil surface, so just sprinkle the sulfur on the soil to avoid damaging roots.

When getting soil tested, also have your soil tested for heavy metals like lead. It≠s an extra fee, but ingesting lead can harm you or your children. And get a test done to measure the amount of organic matter in the soil: you want 4-8% in for good vegetable production.

Spring will get here, eventually. Meanwhile, be patient. Take some time now to read a gardening book on a cold, raw day – perhaps even my new one. You might even recognize some of your favorite articles from this column.