Wow!!! What a beautiful weekend ahead.  Time to go outside and investigate the garden.  Its not quite time to start most seeds yet but you can still indulge in gardening by cleaning your pots and garden tools and maybe a little digging in the dirt, who can resist after the long cold winter, right?

Clean your pots:

First, dump the old potting soil into the compost pile only if the plants had no diseases from the previous year. If you’ve had problems with the plants in that particular pot, then I would just find a spot away from you garden to dump this dirt, maybe cover it with wildflower mix at some point.

Next, Then scrub the pots with a stiff brush and spray with your desired cleaning solution.  There are two methods of sterilizing your pots, you can use a spray bottle with a mild solution of bleach and water (9 parts water, 1 part bleach – plain bleach, not the new concentrated formulas) or you can use a spray bottle of vinegar combined with the juice of one lemon.    Alternately, soak pots in a vinegar solution (1 cup vinegar to 2 gallons of water) and/or  2 tablespoons bleach to 1 gallon of water.

Now, pots are ready for new plants in a few weeks.

Clean your tools:

Scrub them with a steel wool, then coat them with vegetable oil to keep them from rusting.  A light dose of your bleach solution before oiling will prevent the spread of disease in your garden.

Fertilize:

Start uncovering the bulbs that have begun peeking through the soil and lightly fertilize them as well.  Use bone meal, blood meal , or one of those special bulb feeds if you like.  I like to alternate years of bone meal and blood meal.  The one exception to this is tulips, do not feed your tulips now.

Prune your roses and asparagus now and lime.  While you have the lime in-hand, lime the fruit trees as well.  Add manure to any veggie pots and plots you have that are not currently planted.  You can use wood ash in place of agricultural lime if you have some available. 

Plant:

If, like me, you just HAVE to plant something, use  a  few of these clean pots to plant onion seed, chard, winter lettuce, mustard, spinach and keep in a sheltered place away from direct frost.  If you don’t have a frost protected area, you can cover the plants with an old laundry basket turned upside down on nights temps dip below about 40 degrees. Continue planting lettuce and greens every two weeks.  Remember not to cover the seed but just press them into the soil and keep damp.

You can also start green peas and snow peas now for a spring crop…use an inoculant if you have one.  You will want to fertilize any container on a weekly or bi-weekly basis (except for nasturtiums and a most herbs) with a mild fertilizer.  Save water from boiling potatoes or steam veggies, let it cool and use that.  You can also save shrimp shells and egg shells, dry them, place them in a bag and beat them with a hammer to crush, then sprinkle on your garden.   A light sprinkle of 10-10-10 fertilizer is also helpful, when the granules disappear it is time to fertilize again.  Use an old parmesan cheese container to hold your fertilizer.  I also use 10-10-10 on my lawn instead of all those expensive grass fertilizers… well, okay…my husband takes care of the grass…really, what fun is grass except to keep the dirt out of the house?

Start perennials from seed and chives from seed.  You may also start these annuals indoors: alyssum, coleus, datura, lobelia, mimulus, geranium, vinca and heliotrope.  Start hardy annuals outdoors…poppies and alyssum, like lettuce, do not cover but push into the soil slightly and keep damp.  You can keep them damp by covering with a paper mulch.  Check daily and remove the mulch once the seed have begun sprouting.  I would highly recommend purchasing a seed heating mat.   I’ve had much better luck with germinating seed when I’ve used one.

Break the rules:

Today, as usual, I will be breaking the rules and planting strawberries (which should ideally be planted in fall), cleaning pots (and horse blankets) and inventorying my seeds in preparation for warmer months. I plan to reorganize my seeds and start storing them in a recipe box holder.  This will make them much easier to locate when I have an empty spot in the garden.  Have a great spring day!!! Winter will surely wallop us again soon!!! 

Still working on what to plant this year, aren’t you?  So am I.

So far the list goes like this:

Strawberries, because they are so easy and productive.  They require pots with a depth of 8” or more, so I’ll have to decide what pots will be available for them.  Hanging baskets work wonderfully and I really like the hanging bags.

Which varieties to plant here? Depends…don’t you hate that? Do you want strawberries in one big spurt or do you want to spread the harvest out a little? June bearing types produce one large crop, while ever-bearing varieties usually produce two crops.  The newer day neutral varieties produce smaller, lighter crops from June until frost.  Recommended varieties for the sand hills region are: Sunrise, Earliglow, Cardinal, Surecrop, Tioga, Apollo, Albritton, Delite, Chandler and Douglas.  These are all June-bearing varieties.  Apparently all ever-bearers were developed in Northern states and are not as productive here in our southern climate.

The biggest problem with strawberries would be slugs.  Put steel wool in the bottom of your pots to cover the drainage holes and try a row of pennies along the rim.  You can glue them on the outside rim of the pot or just place them along the inside rim of the pot in the soil.

Nasturtiums are another of my favorites.  Good for salads and gorgeous in the garden!  They grow in the smallest of pots, do not require any additional fertilizer (or they won’t bloom). The leaves and flowers provide a spicy watercress-like flavor.  DO make sure you grow these plants chemically free if you intend to eat them.  The nasturtiums I’ve grown seem to prefer shaded roots with sunny leaf exposure.  Given these conditions, nasturtiums will bloom all summer long in your container garden.

Asparagus is one of my most favorite of plants.  Freshly harvested asparagus hold extra sugar, so store-bought “fresh” asparagus is no comparison for taste.  The closest you may come to fresh asparagus flavor is the frozen variety.  Trust me; this trouble-free plant is well worth a place in your garden.  While they will probably not do well in a container, you can grow them almost anywhere in the yard.   The bright yellow foliage in fall is an asset.   I had a 10-year old plant that produced enough spears to eat asparagus once a week from February thru May.  The most difficult part of growing asparagus is digging the holes.  Plant them just like roses…18” deep on hilled up soil with the roots draped around the hilled up soil.

So there you go, a few of my favorite plants.  Until next week, keep working on that list.   

Did you get your list made?  I confess: I am still ogling the catalogs.  I need goals and a budget before I proceed with my list.  My goals this year: 

1. GROW MORE SWEET POTATOES

My potatoes are storing better, longer than the store bought ones.  My potatoes suffer minimal handling and have no bruises like the bin potatoes in the supermarket. 

So how will I grow potatoes this year?  In my 5 gallon bucket again? I think not.  I’m going to try the European Potato Grow bags because they are larger than my  bucket.  I’ve read that trash bags work just as well, but it seems to me that the plastic would disintegrate too quickly in our southern sun. Sweet potatoes will need to grow all summer long into fall.  They are best harvested after the first light frost.  What a fun treat for visiting children over Thanksgiving: to harvest their own sweet potatoes before microwaving and eating them!!!

DOGGIE FUN!

Here’s another sweet potato nugget for everyone with doggies:  Slice an unblemished sweet potato lengthwise and bake at a low temperature (250 degrees) for 3+ hours to the desired crunchiness.  I haven’t tried this yet but you can bet I will be trying this soon.

1. BEAT THE DEER and RABBITS. 

If you live in town, ignore the extension lists of deer resistant plants.  I believe the lists are for country deer who have acres and acres of fields to explore and attack.  City deer are browsers and try a little of everything.  If they love it, they devour it, like pansies, violets and day lillies.  What they don’t eat, the rabbits relish…for example:  last year I planted coneflowers…deer resistant right?  Yes, actually.  But then the rabbit ate them and left poop pellets for payment at the base of my coneflower stumps. They never recovered…the plants, that is. The rabbits are fine.

 I recently saw a baby bunny running in circles in front of my driveway.  Yes, in the middle of the road, running in manic circles. I could just hear him saying, “Here I am…what are you planting for me this year?” 

So how do I beat them?  By planting aromatic plants they won’t consider sampling.  This means herbs, marigolds, dahlias, and, although they are not aromatic, zinnias.  The plants they DO enjoy I will plant on the porch and enclose in wildlife netting.  Hopefully, the deer will not come up on the porch like they do my neighbors’ decks and something will survive, which brings me to my other point for today:

WHAT SURVIVED THE WINTER STORM OF 2011?

Amazingly, I still have lettuce, and collards, even the strawberries seem to have survived being covered in ice.  I’m delighted of course.  Snow peas do not seem to have survived as well, but I still have my Thanksgiving celery.  Do you?

Oh, you don’t know about THANKSGIVING CELERY?  Well, it’s quite simple really.  You take the white base of the celery you used to stuff your turkey. You walk outside.  Find an empty flower pot and sit the stump in the soil…that’s it.  In a few weeks, it will sprout new leaves and begin to grow.  I have yet to grow really long stalks but it’s so nice to see something green in the pots and the leaves can be used just like parsley or cilantro.  Harvest them with scissors and toss into stews, salads and sauces.  Now, how nice is that?