June has been a spectacularly disappointing month for me. Not because sales at my garden center were disappointing, not because the abundance of moisture we received; it was because I got sick with an ‘upper respiratory bug’ that took nearly the entire month to get over. This bug was one of the worst to hit me in my life.
For all you gardeners that have applied fertilizer to your lawn this spring, I feel your pain. With all this rain, plus the fertilizer stimulating growth, I suspect many of you felt you were mowing hay fields instead of your lawns. With warm temperatures and above normal precipitation all our other landscape plants have been in overdrive too, including weeds. A lot of gardeners are asking about a weed they are finding in their lawns that grows to about the height of the lawn with small yellow flowers. It’s called ‘Black Medic’. This is an annual weed, meaning it sprouts from seed
If you consider yourself an environmentalist and have not read Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, shame on you. Ms. Carson wrote about the detrimental effects man made pesticides had on the environment, particularly birds. It awoke our country, causing fierce debate regarding the use of pesticides. An environmental movement like no other ensued. Silent Spring was the impetus for national pesticide policy changes and the beginning of the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency.
From turning off the furnace to turning on the air conditioner, man oh man, that’s how fickle the weather is in early June in Wyoming. As you can imagine, garden centers have been a bee-hive of activity as gardeners are biting at the bit to do what they love to do—get dirty in the garden! Sure there’s the annual rush to get vegetable starts, but what’s surprising to me is the extreme interest by Wyoming gardeners in making a long-term commitment to fruit-bearing plants.
What a wacky spring in Wyoming! In March, the word ‘drought’ and unusually warm temperatures were beginning to play in the minds of gardeners. Back then we were about two to three weeks ahead in plant development with those warmer than normal temperatures. Today, after weeks of cold, snow, and rain, plant development is exactly where it should be for the end of May in Wyoming.
Webster’s Dictionary defines stupid as slow of mind: obtuse, and given to unintelligent decisions or acts. Well, I am stupid. Who in their right mind would have a garden center filled to the brim with landscape plants in May in Wyoming with snow and cold in the forecast? Or as Forest Gump would say “stupid is as stupid does”. So now that you know I’m stupid, let’s chat about young tree care.
Some would say, ‘spring is for lovers’, but at my garden center, it could be said ‘spring is for planting trees’, because there sure is a lot of tree planting going on. It’s not every day a gardener plants a tree, so they have to be reminded the step-by-step process in getting the tree into their new home within your landscape. Really it’s no different than quarterback Peyton Manning passing footballs—it’s all in the mechanics. So let’s have a chat about planting trees.