The awakening of nature in the spring is a joyful time for gardeners. Though it’s also a very busy season, most spring gardening tasks are welcomed by gardeners who are eager to get their hands in the dirt after a long, cold winter.
However, not all spring gardening tasks are fun. If there are tasks you hate, you are in good company. Find out from gardening pros about the tasks they dread.
Meet the Expert
- Melissa J. Will writes about gardening in Ontario, Canada, on her blog Empress of Dirt.
- Liz Wagner is the owner of Crooked Row Farm, an organic vegetable farm in Orefield, Pennsylvania.
Tidying Up Indoor Spaces
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Melissa Will, a gardening blogger at Empress of Dirt, explains how Spring is an exciting and busy time for gardeners. However, there are a couple of tasks that aren’t as enjoyable and should have been tackled in the fall, Will explains. For example, organizing the shed and greenhouse.
Ideally, you would have done this in the winter when there is not much else to do outside but it’s not too late to tidy up any indoor spaces where you keep gardening tools and supplies. Decluttering, organizing, and tidying up not only saves you time during the gardening season, but also helps you determine what supplies you have run out of and determine which tools need sharpening, repair, or replacement.
No matter how big or small your greenhouse is, don’t procrastinate on the cleanup. Greenhouse hygiene is key for plant health because pests and diseases can overwinter in pots with dead plant material.
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Cleaning Tools and Pots
What Will says about cleaning her shed also applies to other maintenance tasks that she failed to do during the fall and winter.
“While necessary, cleaning tools and pots feels like such a waste to spend a beautiful spring day catching up on chores when I could be digging in the soil and planting instead,” Will says.
Cleaning gardening tools should always go together with sharpening them, which is much better done in the depth of winter than on a beautiful spring day.
However, if you don’t have a good place to clean your pots indoors, you might after all be better off waiting until the spring, since scrubbing and sanitizing pots and large planting containers in the freezing winter weather may be unpleasant.
Counting the Losses
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Though not a task that usually appears on spring gardening to-do lists, taking inventory of the plants that did not survive the winter is something gardeners do every year. It might be the most dreaded and least talked about gardening task of all, and even the most experienced gardeners suffer plant losses due to deer browsing, extreme cold, freeze-and-thaw circles, and other weather irregularities.
It’s a manifestation that you can only control nature to a certain extent. However, selecting native plants that are best adapted to your local climate and only plants suitable for your USDA Hardiness Zone are your best bet to keep the losses low.
Fixing Vole and Mouse Damage in Lawn
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As the snow melts, gardeners not only discover the tips of spring flowers breaking through the soil but also some unpleasant surprises. One of those is the ugly pathways of voles (which are different from moles) and mice that look like lightning. The critters, protected by the snow cover, chew away the turf as food and also use it to build nests.
As the weather warms up, the tracks of voles and mice usually fill in on their own. However, if the damage is severe, it requires overseeding the lawn. To keep the damage at a minimum and prevent this dreaded job in the first place, Illinois Extension recommends mowing the lawn at the end of the season to a height of two inches until it is completely dormant in the fall.
Setting Up Drip Irrigation
Drip irrigation undoubtedly has major benefits. It conserves water by dispersing it slowly and evenly and saves gardeners hours of watering time. The installation process, however, is tricky.
“For me, setting up my drip irrigation is the most challenging part of my field prep every spring,” Liz Wagner, the owner of Crooked Row Farm, says.
She explains how she needs to put away and roll up all the lines and main headers in the fall and then have to bring them back out to start on early spring succession crops. Once that happens, the tedious, detailed work starts.
“I’ve gotten better at making sure the lines are not a completely tangled mess, but you have to check all the drip lines for leaks and loose bits,” Wagner explains. “Everything gets moved according to our crop rotation, and if you have one hose reel a little disorganized, it can turn into a big headache.”
Though home gardeners likely have a fraction of the lines that Wagner uses on her farm, the takeaway is that the neater you when are putting away the drip irrigation system in the fall, the less cumbersome it will be to set it up the next spring.
