Inland Northwest Gardening

Geez, Today is April 1 but Mother Nature is still playing winter tricks on us. Monday Spokane broke the all time record for snow set back in the winter of 1949-50 by a tenth of an inch - 93.6 inches. All but 12 of those came in the December and early January dump. And we aren’t done yet. The forecast is for 1 to 3 inches tonight.

Most of the piles of snow are gone save for those where we plowed out the driveway. The new snowblower we bought didn’t arrive until after the Big Dump so it is still unused. I’ve started cleaning out beds and getting piles ready for the shredder.

I have decided to take a different approach to spring clean-up. Instead of pulling all the dead stuff off the beds and moving it to a compost pile I am going to basically break up the piles of leaves, dead plant stalks and then throw them back onto the beds. The pine needles in the backyard will be shredded with the lawn mower and then used as fill in mulch in nearby beds.

What this does besides saving me a lot of work is leave a nice mulch on the beds for nutrients and water conservation in the summer. It takes me about a  fourth the time to do clean-up.

I am going to spend time creating a good vegetable garden. Even there I’ll practice some labor saving by covering the entire garden with 2-3 inches of mulch bnefore I plant. I will then clear space for rows and plant. The only open ground will be the area right around the seed rows or plants so the weeds never get a chance to start and those that do are easy to pull.   I am going to use a piece of cattle panel in a row to run all the climbs crops up starting with peas and ending with tomatoes.  I have to move the red currant bush to a new spot to make room for some raised beds and My Spokane lilac is now big enough to go in the garden. Hope it blooms this year.

I’ve started peppers in the basement and will start tomatoes, celery and a few other things this weekend. I’ve never tried celery so this will be an experiment.

A friend helped prune the fruit trees a couple of weeks ago so they are ready to go. We pruned the gravenstein apple very hard but this is its off year for blooming so there wasn’t going to be any fruit anyway.

I won’t have to fertilize the backyard at all, just rearrange the deer poop an little and its done. I found some piles of moose poop around and may shovel them into the beds. One of our neighbor’s woke up this winter to the moose looking in her window.

That is when it really thaws out