As the hopeful saying goes, April showers bring May flowers. However, spring is also often brushfire season. Fire awareness is the order of the day for outdoor work and activities. The mid-month mini-heat-wave was a reminder that things can become hot and dry, very fast.
The spectacular flowering cherry, Prunus ‘Accolade’ at Polly Hill Arboretum, beckons across the fields on State Road. Flowering cherries, magnolias, and early spring flowers are PHA highlights just now.
Our special Island flower
The Vineyard’s native habitat does not produce eye-catching displays of early spring ephemerals, unlike Polly Hill Arboretum. Ours are more likely to be unshowy, such as skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) and modest, such as the ground-covering rue-anemone, Thalictrum thalictroides, or the shy trailing arbutus, Epigaea repens, also called mayflower.
Traditionally, the sweetly fragrant mayflowers were gathered, until the plants themselves became truly endangered, through careless pulling and plucking. Their habitat too became endangered.
For many years, the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club, along with the Vineyard Gazette, campaigned for respect for the Island’s mayflowers: If they were to be gathered, to please use scissors to sever the tough little stems carefully. Now, due to changes in land use and development, it is unusual to find mayflowers anywhere on the Vineyard.
Earth Day
“Stand up for what you stand on.” Earth Day, the one day per year officially dedicated to health of Earth, our planet, has come and gone.
Those who garden are probably as Earth-aware a demographic as can be found anywhere. This is a good thing: We can model the behaviors we want to see and encourage.
Of the major possible themes of Earth Day, awareness of plastics and plastic reduction in our lives and environments has become a leading focus. Individually, it can be dispiriting to attempt to reduce plastics. Their use and prevalence keep increasing. Rejecting the onslaught becomes almost impossible. This — even while we know that microplastics infest almost every area of the globe, even space, and while in our bodies, affect human health harmfully.
Even though we are swamped with the green industry plastic that many of us resent having to deal with, resourceful gardeners sometimes can get additional successive uses before the items hit the landfill. Even the packaging that mushrooms and chicken pieces arrive in might have a use in growing or propagation.
Take good care of trays, containers, and other plastics that break down under UV, and get as many repeat uses from them as possible. There is no “away,” as in the act of “throwing stuff away.” Everything goes somewhere.
“Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.” –Barry Commoner’s “Four Laws of Ecology”
Also, Arbor Day
A community is formed not only of people but also of surroundings. The damages inflicted on trees during the storms of the winter past removed many old friends, known and venerable trees — leaving gaps and blank spaces and sky they had previously filled.
Arbor Day, celebrated in Massachusetts on April 24, the last Friday in April, almost in conjunction with Earth Day, is a day to plant a tree, dream of a tree you would like to plant, or read up on trees that might enhance your life and surroundings, or replace a tree.
Trees make life on Earth possible. Trees and forests are the lungs of our planet, giving our atmosphere precious oxygen. Trees are the stores of carbon that are exchanged for that oxygen, which creates the thin layer of topsoil that all life on Earth is dependent upon.
Trees are the structure and underpinning for much if not most of the rest of life on Earth that we share our time with. On this Arbor Day, find a tree to plant, or plant a tree’s seed. For links to important tips for tree planting, see bit.ly/GP_TreePlanting.
Growing asparagus
Asparagus season is upon us — yay!
There is a notion that to have a nice asparagus bed the best plan is to buy roots, to get a jump-start on actually harvesting spears as soon as possible. Whether roots (“crowns,” as they are often called) or seed-sown, plants must be allowed to bulk up before harvest can commence. Three years is the time usually suggested.
I am not disagreeing: I have done it both ways, roots and seed-sown. However, time flies in the life of a garden; by way of encouragement, seed-sown asparagus I grew has matured to harvestable size.
Asparagus plants are dependent upon a supply of well-drained, rich soil to support the continued production of spears over the course of harvest. Preparing the bed with the richest, most fertile soil, and then top-dressing annually thereafter, is the best guarantee of a reliable crop.
To allow crowns to replenish themselves, around the end of June, maybe a little later, the final spears are allowed to sprout and “fern” for the rest of the growing season.
If interested in more asparagus background, read Wikipedia’s lengthy and informative article on its long history at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asparagus.
In the garden
Spring brings much yellow. Daffs and forsythia brighten Island gardens in splashes of sunshiney yellow now. For those who desire a softer, more muted yellow, or who find forsythia’s yellow too emphatic, consider the corylopsis family of flowering shrubs. Two understory species are well suited to semi-shaded conditions: Corylopsis spicata and C. pauciflora.
Compared with in-ground direct-sown, growing in modules offers advantages for transplant outdoors when conditions hit optimum, but they must be looked after to avoid setbacks, such as drying out or overheating. Remember to harden off.
Plant lettuce, seed potatoes, and peas. Push/pull hoe: An ounce of weed control now will pay off later. Trim or pinch phlox, Montauk daisies, and other perennials to induce bushiness and reduce need for staking. Lift, divide, and reset divisions of spreaders such as rudbeckia, coreopsis verticillata, or asters. Check wisteria vines for runners; prune them off.
Tick check, every night.