5 Spring Gardening Tasks that Professionals Dread Every Year

By Adam
7 Min Read

The awakening of nature in the spring is a joyful period for gardeners. Although it is also a very busy season, most of them are not gardeners. Gardening tasks in the spring are welcomed by gardeners who are looking forward to putting their hands in the ground after a long and cold winter.

However, all spring gardening tasks are not fun. If you hate certain tasks, you are in good company. Discover the tasks that gardening professionals fear.

Meet the expert

  • Melissa J. Will written on gardening in Ontario, Canada, on his blog The Empress of the Earth.
  • Liz Wagner is the owner of Croooked Row Farm, a organic market garden farm located in Orefield, Pennsylvania.

Ranger interior spaces

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Melissa Will, a blogger specializing in gardening at The Empress of the Earth, explains that spring is an exciting period and busy for gardeners. However, there are a few tasks that are not as pleasant and that should have been accomplished in the fall, explains Will. For example, the organization of the shelter and the greenhouse.

Ideally, you would have done it in winter, when there is not much to do outside, but it is not too late to put order in the interior spaces where you keep gardening tools and supplies. Unclutter, organizing and storing allows you not only to save time during the gardening season, but also to determine the supplies you are missing and the tools that need to be sharpened, repaired or replaced.

Whatever the size of your greenhouse, do not put the cleaning back until later. Serre hygiene is essential for plant health, as parasites and diseases can spend winter in pots containing dead plant material.

Cleaning tools and pots

What Will says about the cleaning of his shelter also applies to other maintenance tasks that he did not carry out during the fall and winter.

“Although necessary, cleaning tools and pots seem to me to be such a waste that I spend a beautiful spring day catching up with household chores when I could rather dig the ground and plant,” says Will.

Cleaning gardening tools should always go hand in hand with the sharpening of tools, which it is better to do in the heart of winter than by a beautiful spring day.

However, if you don’t have a good place to clean your pots inside, you might be better to wait until spring, because it can be unpleasant to rub and clean up pots and large planting bins in an icy winter weather.

Count the losses

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Although it is not a task which generally appears on the lists of things to do in the spring, the gardeners make the inventory of plants each year that have not survived in winter. It is perhaps the most feared gardening task and of which we speak the least, and even the most experienced gardeners undergo losses of plants due to the grazing of deer, extreme cold, circles of frost and thaw and other weather irregularities.

This is proof that you can only control nature to a certain extent. However, by selecting the native plants best suited to your local climate and by choosing only plants that suit your environment, you can improve the quality of water and air. USDA rusticity area is your best asset to limit losses.

Repair the damage caused by Campagnols and Mouses in lawns

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With the melting snow, the gardeners discover not only the tips of spring flowers that pierce the ground, but also some unpleasant surprises. One of them is the awful trail of the Campagnols (which are pets). different from the moles) and mice that look like lightning. The critters, protected by the snow layer, gnaw at the lawn to eat and also use it to build nests.

When the weather warms up, the traces of the Campagnols and the Mouses generally fill themselves. However, if the damage is important, it is necessary Sweet the lawn. To limit the damage and avoid this formidable work, Illinois Extension recommends mowing the lawn at the end of the season at a height of two inches until it is completely dormant in the fall.

Implementation of drip irrigation

Irrigation drip undoubtedly has major advantages. It keeps water by dispersing it slowly and evenly and allows gardeners to save watering hours. The installation process is however delicate.

“For me, the implementation of drip irrigation is the most difficult part of preparing fields every spring,” explains Liz Wagner, owner of Croooked Row Farm.

She explains that she must store and wrap all the main lines and collectors in the fall, then bring them out to start succession cultures in early spring. It was then that tedious and meticulous work begins.

“I improved by ensuring that the pipes are not completely tangled, but you have to check all the watering pipes to detect leaks and detached pieces,” explains Mr. Wagner. “Everything is moved according to the rotation of cultures, and if a pipe reel is a little disorganized, this can turn into a large puzzle.

Even if amateur gardeners probably have only a fraction of the pipes that Wagner uses on his farm, it should be remembered that the more you store your drip irrigation system in the fall, the less difficult it will be to set it up the following spring.

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