Green Guy Report: Winter Recovery of your Garden

Hello Spring!

A couple of suggestions for this week. Firstly, be careful about buying greenhouse plants! You will be seeing beautiful baskets of full flowering plants for sale right now in markets. These plants were grown in greenhouses kept at about 70 degrees Fahrenheit at all the time.

They will suffer badly if we dip into a frost in the next week or so. If you do buy them, watch the weather and take them in at night. My experience with annuals is that they never fully recover from frostbite.

Plants that you can enjoy in early spring with little fear of frost are Pansies, Dianthus, Primroses, Azaleas and Hellebores. All of these can stay outside, no problem.

Buy some potted Daffodils; the minis are my favorite. The best part of purchasing Daffodils is that after they flower you can tuck them somewhere in your garden to die back (let their leaves go brown.) They will flower for you the following year.

Secondly, container-grown plants will have taken quite a beating this winter. Anything planted in the earth has more protection from cold weather than do plants in containers. But in determining what’s alive or dead in your containers, give your plants some time.

Don’t throw them out right away. They may just bud out a little later than usual. During winter, container plants dry out quickly. Water your containers — especially evergreens –whenever the temperature reaches over 50 degrees Fahrenheit