Increasing daylight hours indicate that outdoor gardening activities are just around the corner. Our Master Gardeners will be continuing our vegetable trials at our demonstration site located at the CCE office in Newark again this year. If you stop by later this spring you’ll be able to see what vegetables we’ve planted, plants to attract beneficial insects, our trellis and straw bale garden systems, and several composting systems.
We want to encourage you to include plants that attract beneficial insects too. Beneficial insects can have a significant impact on populations of pests in home gardens and landscapes. To learn more about these important garden helpers call our Master Gardeners.
We also have a new Beneficial Insects presentation that is available to groups of 10 or more in Wayne County. If you’re group and would like to learn more about Beneficial Insects please contact us to get on our presentation schedule.
Those of you interested in trees might want to take part in Project Budbreak. A network of citizen scientists is being established in central New York to observe the timing of flowering, leaf development, fruiting, and leaf drop in populations of common native trees and herbaceous species. This site www.budbreak.org will help observers to enter their data on the timing of important plant events through the growing season.
This project would be a great way to involve our youth in nature too!
Below we have included information about our upcoming events, garden and landscape tips for March, an article written by one of our Master Gardeners, and a list of pollinator plants attractive to beneficial insects.
Monthly garden and home grounds tips:
Tips for Helping out our pollinators
• Flowers clustered in clumps of at least four feet in diameter are more attractive to pollinators than scattered individual flowers.
• A succession of flowering plants that lasts from spring through fall will support a range of bee species.
• Flowers of different shapes will attract different types of pollinators.
• Pesticides are a major threat to insect pollinators.
Tips from Dave Reville, CCE Wayne County Master Gardener:
Bring a touch of spring into your home by saving the pruinings from your flowering shrubs and forcing them into bloom indoors.
This is a good time to check the stakes around your burlap wind barriers, which you erected to lessen wind damage to newly, planted evergreens. Drive the stakes in deeper to tighten the barriers as necessary as windy, cold weather will still be with us.
Gently push any plants that have been heaved out of the soil back into the soil to prevent further winter damage to root systems.
Keep checking the trunks of your new trees and shrubs for rodent damage. If you surrounded the trunk with a hardware cloth wire cylinder, be sure that it is still in place and doing its job.
Check fruit tree guards and other determents to mice, vole and rabbit damage. Trim and broken limbs you find, and if you are using soap bars as a deterrent to deer grazing, add new ones now. Remember that they need to be replaced frequently.
Fruit trees-apple and pear- are pruned during February and mid-March. When performing this chore, remember that fruiting is most prolific on wood exposed to ample sunlight and it is advisable to not remove any more than one third of the tree growth in any one year. The trees can be pruned in dormancy up to “bud Swell”.
For a larger fall crop, ever bearing raspberries can be cut to the ground now. For all other varieties pruning can be postponed for a while.
If you are planning to add new fruit plants to your garden, check carefully for varieties that are disease resistant and hardy. In terms of the fruit trees, know the rootstocks.
This is an excellent time of year to think through what vegetables you will be planting and, based upon your garden journal, what varieties did not perform well or had succumbed to pest problems.
Houseplants tend to suffer abuse from lack of humidity inside our winter homes and exhibit various forms of leaf and tip browning. The easiest way to add humidity to plants is to place a pan of water near the plants and, as it evaporates, moisture is added to the atmosphere immediately surrounding the plants. Portable humidifiers also help as does a humidifier installed on your furnace. Another technique, which works for some gardeners, is to take a large-baking pan or cookie sheet, add a layer of gravel on top. Place the plant pots on top of this and add water almost to the top of the stone layer. Don’t allow plants sit in water.
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