Author: Tom Heald

You’ve heard the quote “from the ashes rises the phoenix”; it’s meant to say that no matter how bad things get there is always a time for rebirth, to celebrate life. It’s a quote that makes sense for me this spring as we deal with death loss associated with cruel winter-like temperatures last November that decimated nearly thirty percent of our landscape plants in a matter of just three days. And as a garden center proprietor I am reminded daily that spring with its rebirth is all around me. Let’s chat about plant death and the prospects of a great spring.

Every gardener I know is outside doing gardening chores. From planting veggies to inspecting what made it through winter to mowing the yard for the first time, it doesn’t matter—gardeners love being outside doing what they love to do, finally. We’ve been busy at my garden center answering gardener’s questions, and boy-howdy do they have a lot of them!

Garden Centers are, of course, a place to go when you are looking to plant anything from veggies to trees—that’s a given. What isn’t so widely known is that garden centers often keep in stock little-known yet highly valuable products for unique problems gardeners from time to time run into. Let’s explore and highlight these products. Gardeners love their flowering crabapple trees this time of year as they swing into flower production. What most gardeners absolutely hate is crabapple production.

At first I sadly chuckled to myself when I read that this past winter was the mildest on record for Wyoming. I’m not arguing it. But back in early November, six weeks before the official start of winter, much of Wyoming experienced one of the most dramatic temperature drops in history for that time of year. All of Wyoming was enjoying a superlative Indian summer throughout October and the first two days of November with pleasant temperatures approaching seventy degrees. Then the bottom fell out.

Arbor Day this year falls on April 24. Arbor Day is considered a tree holiday, a time to celebrate trees in our environment and to plant them for future generations. The first recorded Arbor Day was recorded in a small Spanish village in 1805 where villagers celebrated tree plantings, feasts and dances for three days.

Locally owned garden centers like mine and others across the state are a bee hive of activity these days. We’ve been receiving shipments of trees and shrubs along with soil amendments, gardening tools, bug and weed control products. You name it, chances are we’ve received a shipment of it. It’s all in preparation for the gardening season to begin.

Last week, I took four days off and took my wife and my college age kids to Vegas. I’m quite certain my kids would have enjoyed the edgier side of Vegas if it weren’t for their fuddy duddy parents. We don’t gamble, but the last time I was in Vegas was about ten or so years ago and the slot machines in the casinos made a raucous sound