April Week 1

Organic Gardening Calendar
2 Weeks to frost free date in zone 6

By: Kathi

As the weather warms up the ground warms up and seeds start sprouting. The balancing act is to put down pre-emergent where you don’t want weeds and not put it where you want your summer annuals to return.

Things you will need:
Keen eye
Photographs for comparison

For years I went to the nurseries and big box stores and bought annuals…lots of annuals. I spent hundreds of dollars on annuals every year. Every spring I would go out into my flower beds and pull up hundreds of weeds. I’d turn, fertilize, and plant my annuals, all in nice little soldier rows.

What it took me many many years to figure out was; 80% of all those weeds I pulled up were in fact, seedlings of the very thing I was planting year after year. Yes I pulled up Impatiens, Violets, annual Rudbeckias (Black Eyed Susans), Phlox, Petunias; Vinca….It makes me ill to think about all that I have yanked out of the ground.

I noticed that very few horticultural sources show photographs of plants before their first true leaves appear. I wonder if this could be a plot to keep us buying millions/billions of dollars worth of unnecessary annuals every year.

There were two ways I made these discoveries. The first by being lazy and not properly weeding the flower bed, and allowing this “weed” to grow to a recognizable size. The second was when I began starting my own seeds. Once most of them sprouted, I realized immediately I had seen those hundreds of times before.

So what to do? I f you have a new bed or did not have annuals in it that you want to have again this year; weed the bed! They’re all weeds. That is, unless you get real lucky and get “weeds” that are the most wonderful native wildflowers. If you have wild flowers, pamper them. You will not believe what a “weed” will do if fertilized and watered! My very best plants are “weeds”. If you will look at the photograph on my bio page of the daylily bed, you will see wild daylilies, “Roadside Variety” is what they are called in catalogs and magazines, a native purple Rudbeckia, and a weed that I don’t know what it’s called but everyone asks if I’m not pulling that weed… No, I like it. Just with these you need to cut them back before they go to seed. You’ll keep getting blooms until frost, and you will cut back the seed count by a few million.

These are my favorite type of weed. They have a long bloom period. They are resistant to bugs. They like the climate. No watering. No need to fertilize, but do. A bit of extra water in dry times will keep these weeds fat and happy.

To manage annual beds or weed beds you must be able to recognize the seedlings each spring. My recommendation on weeding is pull only those plants you absolutely know are bad weeds and wait and watch what the others do. Most plants, by the time they are a couple of inches tall, you can tell exactly what they are. It’s those very early days when they might not look like the adult plant.

Once you recognize the seedlings allow them to grow to a 2-3 inch plant and then thin them out if you want to transplant the lifted plants. If you don’t want to keep the extras, pull them as soon as you determine which ones are the biggest and/or healthiest.

I have found that by buying a handful of annuls I can get that early color I crave, but hold out for the volunteer seedlings. By June, they will be bigger and nicer than the store bought transplants. Every year that you allow the seedlings to grow and reproduce, you get a plant more and more specialized for that particular flower bed, or micro climate.

Obviously the bane of these plants is pre-emergent. With practice you can scatter it where you tend to get weeds and use it very sparely where you want seedlings to sprout. HUH? Well yes, some seedlings like the unidentified white mini daisy plant in my yard, with pre-emergent will still send up many more seedling than you want. So with each plant there is a happy spot that balances the pre emergent to number of sprouts. Just a word of caution: wild Geraniums and wild Polypodium do not tolerate pre emergent at all. You will completely wipe out an established bed with a properly timed single application.

Notice properly timed. If you are sprouting spring annuals, after the bed has sprouted, use the pre emergent for the rest of the year, stopping 3 months before its time for the desired seeds to sprout. For annuals, this is almost always in the spring, except Violets and they will sprout any warm day after October through spring.

There are also many perennials that will reproduce by seed. Treat them the same way.

As soon as it stops raining, I will take some photos of seedlings and post them.


Next week:
Fruit Tree Maintenance – spraying setting traps
Getting a jump on spring, planting cold hardy annuals