5 Gardening Tips for March

Tips for your late winter landscape and getting ready for spring. (pictured: Anne's Red™ Hellebore)

Plant for Shade
March is a good time to add lungwort (Pulmonaria) and Lenten rose (Helleborus) to your shade garden, since you can view the flower color. Lungworts are early flowering shade perennials, and Helleborus, known as Christmas or Lenten rose depending on the species, is an evergreen perennial that can start flowering as early as Christmas. The flowers (actually colorful bracts) remain attractive for months. Once established, these deer and rodent resistant plants are drought tolerant and perform well where other shade plants struggle.

Feed Your Pansies
When night temps get above 40 feed your pansies with a water-soluble fertilizer such as 20-20-20.

Watch for Voles
Be on the outlook for vole damage in the garden. One way to deter them is to keep fallen leaves raked out of your beds and particularly from around the base of your plants. Voles prefer to travel under the cover of leaf litter and loose mulch.

When You Think Veggies, Think Small
Evaluate your vegetable garden plans. Often a smaller garden with fewer weeds and insects will give you more produce.

Expand Your Horizons
Consider joining the American Horticultural Society. AHS was founded in 1922 and is an educational, non-profit, organization that recognizes and promotes excellence in American horticulture. With a membership you get the bi-monthly magazine The American Gardener, free and discounted admission to more than 240 public gardens and arboreta, and access to the AHS seed exchange program. If you visit several botanical gardens a year, membership will pay for itself and then some.