O'Donal's Nursery Garden Center Serving Southern Maine

-late February / early April is an ideal time for checking out the world-wide web for information on the garden critters food web, such as ladybug larvae. Numerous gardeners bring in, or call about, suspicious critters on their garden foliage and now is the season to get a good look at some excellent mug shots of common garden pests and their predators. Be sure to check out the beneficial insects (they’re the good guys) on these web sites – lady bug larvae look quite sinister, with their flat, scaly, v-shaped bodies and their zillions of legs, while the larvae of the lily-leaf beetle (which really is a destructive pest) looks just like it would be a baby lady bug to my eye. Here are some internet sites to check out:

• Ohio State Copperative Extension
  ag.ohio-state.edu/bygl/images/index.html
• Maryland Cooperative Extension
  agnr.umd.edu/users/cmrec/gin.htm

-getting out there onto the snow-pack (or mud-packed, in March & April) and seeing what creatures are scuttling and bounding around in the landscape. While I was doing some post-storm shoveling I noticed a set of wing-prints in the snow still burying my mini-van. My driveway intersects the birds' flight path to my birdfeeder, and someone apparently was blown a bit off-course on one trip that morning. Later I snow-shoed around to "check things out" on my sanctuary-ette of 1.5 acres, and found evidence of lots of animal activity. Foot- and Tail-prints of mice, voles, and squirrels as well as an intriguing trail from something larger, later identified – and confirmed by a surprise encounter! – as an adult opossum.

When I went further afield into my neighbor’s woods I saw crow tracks and wing prints, ruffed grouse tracks, a huge nest (probably a hawk’s), gypsy moth egg masses on tree trunks… So ‘git on out there, on a calm, warmish day – there’s lots to be seen out in your yard, even in late winter and mud-season.

-great time to get out your old garden mags and resource books to plan new additions to the annual / perennial beds. Those gorgeous seed catalogs can be a real inspiration, even if you don’t plan to raise the plants from seed yourself (you can always stop in at O’Donal’s and get them already up and growing!).

This is the best time to reflect on last year’s failures and successes, and to plot spring duties on your calendar. For example, my fleabane (Erigeron) must be divided this year, so I’ll have enough space to tuck in a fringed Bleeding Heart (Dicentra eximia) in that bed. And bulbs! My gosh, Bulbs! Have wooden markers ready, so that when your spring bulbs come up you can tuck in unobtrusive reminders for fall bulb planting: my 8" popsicle-stick-type markers say things like "10 early red tulips here", or "100 double crocus, please!".

This is also a good time to make sensible decisions about whether a particular plant, or plants, should go or stay. If an evergreen is not well it will look really unwell in early spring (even some that are well will look a bit off-color), and deciduous plants haven’t leafed out yet, so one can be a bit harder of heart, I find. The lilac you’ve grown from a division given to you by an old classmate – well, it has kind of grown, (but not really), because the soil under those pines is too acid, and there’s too much shade…make a note to dig that baby up and give to the new neighbor who lives in that field across the road with tons of sun – and replace it with one of those handsome Andromedas that love the shade and acid soil! And as for that ornamental plum that you sent away for, that has had every disease and pest in the Sate of Maine – dig it up and burn it! Put in something tough but unusual, like a White Fringe Tree (Chionanthus virginicus), or a St. Johnswort Shrub (Hypericum fondosum). If you have a yew hedge that the encroaching deer population have discovered with hosannas, and now dine upon it no matter what concoction you spray on it – give it up! Don’t let it give you ulcers, or end up with your investing the equivalent of a third-world country’s GNP on poisons and contraptions! Take my word for it, the deer have far more time and energy to devote to this than you do – it’s what they do for a "living", after all! Take out the yews and put something the deer don’t like: a chain-link fence? you ask. No, no; there are a number of handsome hedge-plants that deer do not favor. Stop by and we will give you a list.

-buy the book The Adventurous Gardener by Ruah Donnelly and plan a few horticultural field trips this year. If you’re really slick you’ll use The Birder’s Guide to Maine by Liz and Jan Pierson to coordinate a two-pronged field trip for both flora and fauna – wow! Definitely plan to take the new train to Boston to visit the Arnold Arboretum to see fully mature specimens of trees you are thinking of adding to your landscape.

If you have managed to wrestle control of the family computer away from the kids, visit one of Maine’s most informative and entertaining horticultural sites, Jeff Tarling’s Forestry Division section at the City of Portland website. Just type "city of portland" as the address for your browser; the actual address is so long and compacted I don’t trust myself to reproduce it correctly. It has all kinds of cool links, from Backyard Conservation and EPA Green Landscaping, to a copy of the Forestry Divisions yearly report (ah, the infamous Annual Reports!) from 1901, in which the writer sternly admonishes the city marshal and police for not preventing tree damage from horses gnawing upon the city trees the citizens hitched them to!

- stop in at O’Donal’s and have a chat with us, we’d love to see you!

Susan Babb