It’s been another month! April has to be one of the most dynamic for the garden - at least, it’s definitely one of the busiest! The combination of spring rain, warmer temperatures, and longer days mean that everything just explodes with new growth. Here’s a rundown of the biggest changes and milestones in the garden from the last 30 days!

Seedling hardening off: One of the first things to happen is that the remainder of the veggie and flower seedlings all moved outside to join the tomatoes. We brought them into the garage if night temperatures dipped below about 45, but the goal was to transition them gently from being under artificial light to enjoying real sun and slightly lower temperatures, without the risks associated with going in the ground before the last potential frost date. For us, that date is somewhere around April 16, though there is some wiggle room. Last year, there was a frost on the last frost date, and anyone who took a chance and put tender plants out early lost them. Our philosophy has been to play things safe when it comes to all of the babies we’ve tended lovingly for the last couple of months, and wait until a little after the risk of frost to plant.
Digging the tomato border: Last year, we grew tomatoes in pots. We hoped that by having them in pots with sterile potting soil we’d avoid the septoria leaf spot fungus that is borne in the native soil. But… the fungus found us anyway, even in pots. It doesn’t kill the plants immediately, just requires more maintenance to remove affected foliage and thus prolong the life of the plant long enough to get a good yield off it. EG - more work. Since the pot trick didn’t solve things, we decided to try something different this year and so dug up a border that had previously just been grass and some weeds, right outside the cutting garden fence. If it works well, it will be a really efficient use of the space and a fun way to fit in 15 big tomato plants that would have been hard to find spots for elsewhere in the garden. (Fingers crossed!)
Mulching and fertilizing: We planted between 2 and 3 dozen trees and shrubs through late winter and spring last year, a lot of them along the perimeter as future privacy hedges. With the crazy drought last summer, it was all we could do to just keep them all alive. We definitely didn’t fertilize right away to push major growth the first season because we needed everything to focus on putting down good roots. But this spring it was definitely time to give everything a boost. Instead of bringing in a dump truck load of mulch like we did last spring, we decided to mulch all of the second-year plantings with our own compost from the past year instead. That with a dose of about 1 cup/shrub of 10-10-10 was the spring dress and feed. I don’t often use non-organic fertilizer, but I was willing to make an exception in this case because a) these weren’t edibles, b) we needed to do a lot at once, and c) we want as much growth as possible this season since most of the new plantings are for privacy.
Compost rotation: This is definitely a Brian specialty. I don’t do much with the compost except for add kitchen and garden scraps to it. B takes care of turning it, covering it when it rains, and making sure there’s a balance of fresh greens (nitrogen source) and browns (carbon source). We have a three-bay system currently: an active, a “cooking”, and a turf stack. After using last year’s cooked compost to mulch our trees and shrubs, we rotated what was the active bay into the “cooking” bay to be left alone for a year, and we started a new pile for this year’s additions. This is the second full year we’ll have been composting, and it’s really rewarding to be throwing out much, much less food waste and recycling everything but the biggest branches and most evil weeds (brambles, poison ivy, etc) from any work we do on the property.
Planting out seedlings: Those last couple of weeks just crawled by, but I finally planted all the seedlings out (around 200 — give or take — of various flowers, herbs, and veggies) on April 25. I’ll probably do a full post later of just exactly what made it into this year’s garden roster. Some of them were favorites from what we grew last year, and some of things are new and experimental for this season!
Final direct seeding: Once I had all the seedlings in, I could see spots that I had some extra space to do a little more direct seeding. I wanted to try a staggered flower schedule this year anyway, so I direct sowed cosmo, zinnia, marigold, strawflower, and gomphrena into those little pockets in hopes that they’ll germinate over the next couple of weeks and be ready take over the show once the first wave of flower seedlings is starting to fade out.
First proper outdoor dinner: I mention this because sometimes it’s important to get ouside and not do any work but just enjoy the results from all of those evenings and weekends. One of our favorite things to do together is host outdoor dinners. We don’t have a huge indoor space, so if we want to have a large gathering, outdoors is best. We have big plans someday for an outdoor pavilion that would function like the porch we don’t have, but until then, it looks like a long wooden table set up in the shade and time spent lingering around the fire pit.
Chickens: We got 8 baby chicks in mid-February, and they went outside the same day that I planted all of the seedlings — big graduation day for everyone. Building a mobile coop was a major project over the first three months of the year, and I plan to do a post all about that process at some point. You can see the plans that we used from Green Willow Homestead here. After visiting Polyface Farms last summer and seeing Joel Salatin’s mobile coops, we knew that’s what we wanted for our girls: the benefit of free range with all of the protection of a full structure. It’s been so fun to see them outdoors in their element, scratching and pecking and learning how to be proper chickens. The very first night we had to manually lift them up the ramp to the secure roosting area, but after that instinct kicked in and they’ve come down by themselves easily and put themselves to bed each night the moment the light starts to fade.
Planting Emily’s bed: My oldest sister Emily passed away from a battle with brain cancer in mid-March. I wrote about this in a recent post on the topic of gardening and grief, but planting things has been a really helpful way for me to process grief over the past few years. Mid-March, we had a large pecan that was shading the cutting garden removed, and by late April we had someone come to grind the stump. Once that was done, I planted up the entire area with a mix of low evergreens and flowering shrubs like itea, eastern viburnum, arrowwood viburnum, avergreen dogwood, and a centennial star magnolia as the centerpiece. It doesn’t look like much now, but I’m eager to see it mature over the years.
Replanting window boxes: This is our third year with front window boxes and each season, I’ve tried something different. Certain things do great in that environment, other things languish, and other things are thuggish and try to take over the whole box (never plant vinca in a window box)! The classic formula is thriller, filler, spiller, and this year I’ve gone all white in the front with a combination of geranium, angelonia, diamond frost euphorbia, dusty miller, trailing verbena, and snow-in-summer (cerastium) for a combination of bold blooms, interesting texture, and trailing features. I learned pretty quickly that any colors other than white or cream don’t show up well from the road, and with a red brick house the options for what looks good is fairly limited anyway. In the back boxes, which get a combination of sun and shade, I’ve kept the same staple of heuchera, blue dart juncus, snow-in-summer, and a trailing evergreen (that I can’t remember the name of!) for years now, simply because it works and doesn’t require seasonal replacement. Occasionally I’ll tuck something else in, like violas or (this season) dusty miller, but the original combination stays evergreen and classic.
Wild areas cleanup: This is one of those every-spring-necessities. Because our property was neglected for many years before we moved in, we’ve chosen to tackle an overgrown area each season with the goal of eventually reclaiming every corner back to beauty and productivity. It has been rewarding to restore order where there was once a giant patch of terrible brambles or clear out undergrowth and discover a swath of daffodils. Two edges of our property border wild areas, so we have a consistent battle with the invasive species coming over and under the fences, even after we’ve done thorough cleaning on our own side. To keep the undesirables at bay, I go through every year along the back and side boundaries and do what I call a “search and destroy” for all brambles, privet seedlings, winter creeper sprouts, and anything else that might have showed up uninvited. If I didn’t do this, all the work from previous seasons would quickly dissolve into chaos again.

I hope that you’ve all been able to get outside and enjoy the spring weather this past month. Thanks for following along! XO

Garden Update | April 2020