February/March Home and Yard Maintenance

Sometime around the tax preparation tasks, there are also those tasks associated with our home and yard maintenance to keep it at it's maximum value.  Besides that, to me when the Spring weather breaks even just a little, I want to be out cleaning up the yard and looking for early blooms and blossoms.  I have about 20 varieties of daffodils that bloom as the spring progresses.  My large pink hyacinths, blue grape hyacinths, Jack Snipe daffodils, early Ice Folly daffodils, butterfly narcissus, pansies, among others are blooming.  Color is returning to the landscape! 

So much to do, though.  If you like an early season veggie garden, now is the time to start planting broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower plants and to sow seeds for Sugar Snap peas.  If you don't have a regular vegetable garden, you can always sneak a few plants in and around in your regular plantings.  They'll add texture and color.  Grow peas up your mailbox post!   Trim your monkey grass and lariope before the new growth starts.  Fescue lawns, perennial beds, and pansies can be fertilized now. Pre-emergent crabgrass prevention should be applied before March 20.   Keep your weeds in check now and reseed your fescue lawns now.  Prune your hybrid tea, grandiflora and floribunda roses.  Now is the best time to plan and plant new flower beds with perennials and flowering shrubs.  You can fill in with summer annual flowers after April 15th (our local average last frost date).  Keep some lightweight cloth, plastic or maybe cardboard boxes handy to cover tender buds and new plantings if it gets very cold or icy in the meantime.   A couple of general rules of thumb when pruning:  prune after a shrub finishes blooming and never prune more than one third the size of a shrub at one cutting.  One last comment:  please try to use no or as little as possible chemical products in the maintenance of your yard and gardens.  For the sake of our environment, keep it organic.   Our future water supply, birds, lizards, toads, lady bugs, preying mantis, all the way up the food chain will be better for it. 

 Tomorrow, I will blog a little about home maintenance issues for this month.