Gardening Guru

By Melanie Mathieson
The Gardening Guru

This is the time of year when many gardeners are out planting spring flowering bulbs.
Let’s face it, planting bulbs is a time-consuming job that involves a fair degree of effort and nothing is more frustrating than watching your local squirrel population digging around, undoing your hard work, and running off with their cheeks stuffed full of tulip bulbs!

By Melanie Mathieson
The Gardening Guru

Although spring is many months away, this is the time of year that gardeners must think ahead to spring if they want to be rewarded with the first flowers of the season from bulbs that are planted in the fall.
Spring flowering bulbs consist of many species, such as tulips, hyacinths, snowdrops, daffodils, crocus, and even irises. These bulbs must endure a period of cold (winter season) while in the ground in order to activate their growth pattern when the soil warms.

By Melanie Mathieson
The Gardening Guru

With the arrival of the cooler fall weather, gardening thoughts start turning towards ignoring the garden and leaving the clean-up until spring.
Well, there still are a number of gardening tasks that can be carried out on the pleasant autumn days right up until the ground freezes.
Certainly yard and garden clean-up should be at the top of the list. Dead vegetable and flowering annual plants have been accumulating, and all the leaves from trees will be coming down soon!

I’m a big advocate of adding mulch to your garden. If we didn’t use mulch, we could never keep up with the weeds, especially with the large-sized gardens I have in my yard.
We mulch around the fruit trees with bark (or you could use wood chips) to keep the sucker and weed growth to a minimum while making mowing around the tree much easier.
We mulch the perennial beds with pine bark to conserve soil moisture and minimize weeds.

My last column provided you with some information on whether you may want to install mulch products in your yard or garden.
The terminology around gardening can be a bit confusing at times, never mind a topic like that of mulch. As such, this column will assist you in understanding the terms related to the types of mulch you may consider for your garden.
Some gardeners are confused by the terms “mulch,” “spring mulch,” and “winter mulch.” These terms are defined for you:
•Mulch

When starting seeds indoors, you do not have to worry about the weather, insects, or the myriad of plant diseases and fungi that can affect your outdoor vegetables, trees, or flowers.
There is, however, one disease you must be concerned with when starting seedlings in the house or greenhouse and directly in the garden, called damping-off, which quickly can turn the initial joy of seeing your young seedlings poke through the soil and start to grow into a complete crop failure almost overnight.

Believe it or not, spring is really just around the corner and now is the time for the gardener to start thinking about starting some seeds indoors.
Gardening can be expensive if you need to buy a lot of plants to fill your garden each year. As such, starting your own plants from seed is an economical way of extending the budget for plants.
You can start all kinds of plants from seed, including annual flowers, perennials, herbs, many houseplants, and, of course, vegetables.

By starting seeds indoors, you often can extend your growing season by up to 10 weeks. This can be very beneficial for plants that have a longer “days to maturity” time frame.
You even can start some of the newer hybrid varieties with shorter “days to maturity” time frames indoors and then sow some directly into the garden so you can have a harvest of produce early and over an extended period of time throughout the summer months.
When starting seeds indoors, you want to determine the last frost date in your area. This is usually June 1 in our area.

Starting plants from seed is a fairly easy task, but a review of Seed Science 101 will help ensure success and keep your work to a minimum.
It may offer an answer as to why those seeds didn’t germinate a few years ago. Follow the tips below when starting any plant from seed and you will get great results.
•Seed viability.
Do you have some seeds saved from a few years ago? There are a few ways of testing whether they will germinate.

Gardening season is just around the corner, so I always use the last few days of winter for some garden planning.
One of the best ways to plan is by using seed catalogues.
There are many mail order seed and plant suppliers in both the United States and Canada, so the number of catalogues you can use for reference are unlimited.
If you do not receive seed catalogues directly, the December/January issue of “Canadian Gardening” has an annual listing of reputable mail order gardening business you can contact.