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Spring Garden Cleanup

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The snow has finally melted here at the Suburban Farmhouse, and spring has sprung. With the start of spring comes a number of outdoor chores as we work to clean up and prepare the gardens for the growing season. 

One might think that spring cleanup starts as soon as we can get outdoors, but in truth it starts during the cold, dark days of winter here in Wisconsin. While the ground is frozen and Mother Nature is sleeping, we are busy identifying all the things we need to get done before summer arrives. Making a list is truly the first step in starting our spring cleanup. The list always contains activities such as weeding and deadheading, and some years includes staining the fence and walkway maintenance. Always, the list is much longer than we can possibly get done in one season. This of course leads us to step two – prioritization of the list. We like to keep our spring cleanup lists from year to year so we know what we decided to postpone and get around to “some day”. One thing we’ve postponed for a number of years is dividing our perennials. We’ve kept it on the list, but it never quite made it to the top until this year. So far these are paper lists, which we periodically consolidate to reduce the pile of paper lists. Eventually we hope to get these into an electronic format we can simply update and print since most of the tasks are the same each year.

When we make our spring cleanup list, we also include all spring cleaning activities – both indoor and outdoor, as they will all demand our time and need to be prioritized. Once the list is complete and prioritized, we then break out the calendar and start blocking time to get things done. Since we also work full time jobs, this is a critical step. Here are a few of the things to think about:

Making the List, and Checking it Twice

  • Indoor repair and maintenance jobs (replace batteries in smoke detectors, touch up paint, fix faucet drips, etc.)
  • Indoor spring cleaning (make a checklist for each room so you can divide out the tasks like washing the windows, dusting the baseboards, and cleaning behind the refrigerator and oven)
  • Seed starting
  • Outdoor repair and maintenance jobs (rabbit fencing, test and repair hoses, stain fence, etc.)
  • Tool maintenance (clean and sharpen shovels and hoes, start up the lawnmower, check what needs to be repaired or replaced, etc.)
  • Outdoor cleaning (weed, prune, deadhead, divide perennials, etc.)
  • Miscellaneous outdoor projects (build patio furniture, setup greenhouse, repair soil grade around foundation, etc.)

Now that your list is done, go ahead and prioritize it. Ok, let’s be serious…the list will never actually be done. There are always things you discover along the way that need to be done, and often done right away. We’ve been meaning to divide the perennials along our front walk for about 10 years now, and raise the grade around areas of our foundation for about 4 years. This year we decided that we had to make that priority number one, because if we didn’t, sooner or later we would start getting water damage in the basement as snow melt and spring rains drained toward the house instead of away. Fortunately for us we could use some of the excess soil from dividing perennials and use it in the low areas around the foundation to raise the grade and slope the soil away from the house. Now that this was priority one, we needed to estimate how long it would take us, and block time on the calendars, making sure we also had some rain dates. Then we could schedule everything else around our number one priority. We try to have an “A” plan and a “B” plan so we can adjust due to weather.

Know Your Zone

A key element in knowing when we can do what in the yard is understanding what planting zone we are in. This is particularly important when it comes to planting our garden, and starting our seeds. Here at the Suburban Farmhouse, we’re located in Zone 5a. This means that we can expect our latest spring frost to occur as late as Mother’s Day weekend, so we don’t plan on planting those tomatoes outside any earlier! When starting seeds indoors, we want to use our last spring frost date to help us calculate when to sow the seeds. 

We also consult the plant hardiness maps for our area before selecting any plants that we want to survive for more than one year – fruit trees, berry plants, perennials, etc. It is important to make sure that the varieties we select are hardy in our climate.

Handy resources include:

Use your zone maps to help you schedule when to:

  • Start your seeds
  • Harden off and seedlings
  • Direct sow 
  • Transplant seedlings

Remember to add these activities to your calendar.

Getting to Work

Now that we have our list of (almost) everything that needs to get done, and we’ve prioritized it, it’s time to get started. Since we’re mostly focused on spring cleanup in this article, we’ll talk about those activities and address all the prep work with sowing seeds and such in another post.

Spring can be divided into early, mid-, and late spring with the activities occurring in each dependent on priorities and weather. Here in Wisconsin, we can easily have snow on the ground thru Easter, so weeding won’t occur until the ground is thawed. That said, there is still plenty to do while the snow is melting and the ground is thawing. 

Early spring

This is a great time to get out and get some pruning done, particularly for fruit trees. This year we were out in early March giving our apple, prune, and pear trees some much needed love. This is a task we’ve been hesitant to tackle in years past, mostly because we didn’t trust ourselves to “do it right”. But what does that really mean? We’ve read books and blog posts, we knew all the theory, but when it came actually putting saw to wood, we hesitated. We couldn’t ignore it any more. The trees needed pruning and the excuses had to end. So we marched out with our ladder and saws, and got to work. 

Tackling one tree at a time, we started with removing crossing branches. We had to select carefully so we could work toward bringing the trees back into balance. They had been pillaged by deer several years ago and now lean a bit to one side. Next we removed some of the taller branches in order to keep the trees to a manageable height. We also removed anything hanging too low or too far over the vegetable garden. In the end, we removed no more than one third of each tree. Next year we’ll continue the pruning and work on the next third. 

Here are a few of the resources we found helpful on our pruning journey:

Tree Pruning 101

  • Remove branches growing toward the center of the tree to encourage outward growth and allow sunlight to reach the center.
  • Remove any branches that cross one another, eventually causing rubbing that may weaken them as they grow.
  • Remove suckers and water shoots. Suckers are those branches growing from near the ground, and water shoots are those growing straight up along a larger branch.
  • Work to develop a solid center of balance so the tree doesn’t tip over, creating a new central leader if needed.
  • Shorten branches that may be getting too tall in order to keep the tree to a manageable height for harvesting fruit.
  • Remove any low branches which may be in your way in order to lift the canopy to a workable height.

When we finally finished with the fruit trees, we gave our blackberries their annual trim. Since blackberries are more of a vine, and they bear fruit on wood that is two years old, it’s important to remove only the dead wood. In most cases this was easy to determine by checking whether the vine was starting to leaf out. Occasionally, we gently scrape the branch to see whether it is wet or dry. A dry branch is dead and can be removed. A wet one is still living and should bear fruit this year. When removing the blackberry vines, we cut them all the way down at ground level in order to make room for the new growth, and to be able to access this year’s berry harvest.

Next up was to remove all the debris from perennial beds. We leave the dead twigs and leaves for animals to overwinter. They provide some food and shelter for numerous critters during our long winters. This can be both a blessing and a curse as the rabbits and voles thank us by eating our newly planted gardens later in the season. As we trimmed away the dead plant material we collected everything for our compost heap. Our hope this year is to work towards becoming fully self-sufficient with our compost needs. Check out future posts about building and maintaining a compost pile.

We also took the opportunity to finally divide the perennials along the front walk. They’ve needed dividing for a few years now but never seemed to make it to the top of the priority list. This year it needed to happen. In addition to being overgrown, the mulch we’ve added to these beds had decomposed over the years and lifted the soil level well above that of the surrounding lawn. It was time to shave this back down to size. As it happens, we found ourselves in need of soil elsewhere to fix the grade around the foundation. We had several areas where the soil had sunk around the foundation of the house and water was now draining toward the house risking the development of mold issues in the basement. So we had a perfect solution, with the only cost being some sweat equity.

Between our day jobs and spring weather it took a couple of weeks of off and on labor to dig up the perennials, remove the excess soil, and replant what we were keeping. The extra plants we placed in bins by the road and we used Facebook Marketplace to let our community know they were free to a good home. One family that stopped by had just moved into a new home with no landscaping. A number of our plants are now providing the foundation of their flower beds

Early Spring Cleanup

  • Pruning – fruit trees, vines like grape and blackberry, hedges and shrubs, etc.
  • Maintain paths, structures, irrigation
  • Prep for vegetables
  • Divide perennials, particularly fall flowering perennials. Wait with the spring flowering perennials until the fall if possible so they can gather energy and recharge their bulbs if possible
  • Repair hardscaping such as fencing, edging, and stone work now as long as the ground is not too wet or frozen

Mid-spring 

By mid-spring the garden is really starting to come to life. The fruit trees are flowering, tulips are in bloom, and weeds are getting a jump start on all the spring perennials. As if pulling out those persistent weeds was not enough work to do, the grass is also starting to grow and requires mowing at this time of year. And depending on the amount of rain, may well need mowing twice a week! This year we took full advantage of the rapidly growing grass to help kickstart our compost bin, layering all that fresh green goodness with all of the dead plant material from our garden cleanup in order to get the internal temperature up to 140F and super charge the composting process.

Mid-spring cleanup

  • Clean and prep borders for the year
    • Pull dead plants
    • Reset any frost heaved plants
    • Loosen mulch
    • Edge along beds
  • Remove early and large weeds
  • Apply mulch
  • Lawn Care – reseed bare spots, apply spring fertilizer
  • Manage the compost bins
    • Empty finished compost to garden
    • Turn compost
    • Start building new compost heap
    • See compost article

Late Spring

As we move into late spring and early summer most of the heavy lifting with regard to cleanup has been finished. We use this time to wrap up any loose ends, and move more into maintenance mode when it comes to cleanup. Mowing the lawn is now a regular task, often scheduled around spring storms. Deadheading the spring blooming perennials and flowers to keep things looking tidy, and of course continuing to be after any persistent weeds that just haven’t gotten the message that they are not welcome. 

Late spring/early summer cleanup

  • Continue mulching
  • Deadhead spring bulbs – let the leaves remain until they die back. This allows them to continue feeding the bulb and ensure a beautiful flowering next year.
  • Prune spring flowering shrubs

As cleanup moves into maintenance mode here at the Suburban Farmhouse things move into high gear as we replace the pruning shears with the dibble. It’s time to get planting!

-Kim

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