When Will That Garden Grow? You Know You Want to … But You Have to Wait

When winter starts releasing its grip and spring slowly emerges, gardeners’ thoughts turn to greenery and to planting, but those of us who live in the Lake Superior region know one important maxim:

Wait.

It’s so tempting, given our extended winters, to rush out as the snow recedes to start working the soil and beautifying our landscapes, tempting to plant at least the vegetables so they’ll have a long enough season to produce crops.

Wait.

The general rule of thumb is to do nothing, aside from planning and growing plants indoors, until the fear of frost leaves our northern climes. That means mid-May and often after Memorial Day.

But it’s April and the weather seems warmer. How can you wait?

Bob Olen, a horticulturalist with the St. Louis County Extension office in Duluth, knows that gardening itch. He offers some hands-on things you can do early.  

If you’re a Duluth gardener, you might know Bob. He co-hosts the show “Great Gardening” on WDSE-WIRT TV with co-host Tom Kasper, a Duluth greenhouse owner. (The new season starts in April 6, when Duluth Garden Flower Society members will join them. So watching this might help that gardening itch.)

Depending on the weather, you might be able to get your hands into the dirt as early as April, Bob says.

“Plant trees, shrubs and most herbaceous perennials early in the season as soon as the frost is out of the ground, typically late April or early May.”

Dormant pruning of trees and shrubs should be done before the buds begin to swell, Bob says, which could occur in March or very early April.

What you don’t want to do is plant the less hardy plants too early. “Delay planting frost-sensitive plants until the danger of frost has passed,” Bobs says. “Wait until the soil has warmed. If earlier planting is desired, use seed that has been treated to prevent seed rot in cool, wet soils.”

Time, though, is of the essence when dealing with northern gardening, and certain concessions to our short growing season must be made. “Annual seed for the vegetable garden should be selected to mature in our relatively short, frost-free growing season,” he says.

Chose varieties of tomatoes, sweet corn and other warm-season crops that have maturity spans of 75 days or less. Some vine crops can fit into a growing window of 100 days or less. “Most cool season crops will do well in our cooler climate,” Bob says. Think peas and root vegetables.

Bob advises that gardeners should never forget where they live. “Variety selection and timing are two critical issues for northern gardeners. Winter hardiness is critical when selecting trees, shrubs and ornamental perennials. Depending on your location, select plants that are Zone 3 or Zone 4 to be sure of winter survival.”

The master gardener has one more piece of spring yard and garden advice: Wait on the mowing. (No problem here, right?)

“Delay mowing and fertilizing the lawn until there is a flush of new blade growth, sometime in May,” Bob says. You can remove debris gently with a fan rake beforehand, but working the yard and soils before they are sufficiently dried out can led to compaction and a more difficult medium for plants to grow in.

For Joanne Hannula of Laurium, Michigan, spring does not bring the have-to-garden anxiety it might once have. The lifelong gardener, who used to maintain a master gardener certification, fell in love with daylilies, planted a majority of the perennials and now most of her extensive  gardens basically grow themselves.

“Ninety-nine-point-nine percent are perennials,” she says, adding that she rarely buys more than half a dozen annuals in a year.

For Joanne, the expense of annual plantings that last only a few months doesn’t make sense, plus she found her gardening love in the hardy plant that produces one blossom for a short, but beautiful, time.

“I’m into daylilies. I have close to 1,000 daylilies.”

Joanne is a member of a daylily club in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and makes at least one trip a year there to talk about plants or perhaps to pick up an interesting hybrid.

She tries to get any new perennial into the ground in May. “I try to buy them in the spring so they have all summer to get established.” She prefers spring to fall plantings because fall creates a risk for frost heaving.

Mid-summer is no better. “You try to stay away from hot, hot days transplanting because it’s just a lot of strain on the plant.”

For a new plant’s first year, she pays close attention to watering and caring for the newbies, but by year two, the plants must fend for themselves.

“Once my seedlings have become established, or even new plants, they are on their own. If mother nature decides to rain, they’ll get watered. … If you keep on babying them, the roots don’t search for water, so you’re just training them to be needy.”

It’s a practical view of gardening in an area where city water can be expensive.

Joanne’s interest in gardens blossomed when her family stopped spending each summer on Isle Royale. “We were on Isle Royale for 24 plus years in the summer, so I just had a token garden at the edge of the (Laurium) house on the southside.”

When they started staying in Laurium for the summer, she says, “I started getting more into gardens and I had roses, but you have to spray and you have to coddle them.”

Then she saw an ad in a gardening catalog for “Canadian Border Patrol” daylilies and ordered some. “When they came, they looked like iris roots, dry. I thought, ‘They’ll never survive.’ I’ve still got them all, and that was 20 some years ago. You get so much bang for your buck, and that’s daylily.”

Joanne cultivates her own hybrid lilies and says there’s no better high than seeing that one-day blossom from a plant you nurtured from scratch. “You take your cup of coffee, and you start walking around and you see it. Nobody in the world has seen that bloom but you, that’s yours alone.

“Sometimes they are ugly,” she admits, “but they are yours.”

Daylilies are not the only stars in Joanne’s multiple gardens. She cultivates grasses, has magnolia trees, a few wisteria and healthy clematis, among her dense plantings. She has spring bulb bloomers, too, like daffodils and crocuses (a dessert favorite of chipmunks, unfortunately) that might pop through early spring snows, but for Joanne, her main color season really begins in June and truly blossoms in July. “Mostly,” she says, “it’s waiting for the daylilies to start.”

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Garden Tours

June and July are garden tour months around the Lake neighborhood. Here are a few you may want to include in your travel planning:

• The Bayfield Garden Tour from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. June 2 allows you to use a downloadable map for self-guided visits to some of Bayfield, Wisconsin’s finest gardens (like these photos at Le Chateau Boutin). Homeowners and gardeners are on the sites to answer questions. www.bayfield.org/

• The Duluth Garden Flower Society’s “Secret Garden Tour” July 21 features six to seven private homes with diverse gardens. Tour goers usually have the option of a chauffeured bus, including lunch, or a “drive yourself” map. The tour is extremely popular and often sells out. Society President Taire Suliin says the society understands our spring impatience and plans early events to get people primed for the season, like its annual spring lunch, May 12 this year with Tom Uecker, president of Monarch Butterfly Buddies, as speaker, and a plant sale later in May – closer to when you can actually plant. www.dgfs.org

• The Duluth Woman’s Club begins its annual “Tour of Homes & Gardens” at 10 a.m. July 18. www.duluthwomansclub.com.

• The Thunder Bay Art Gallery hosts a fundraising garden tour July 29. theag.ca/events/garden-tour-4

• EcoSuperior in Thunder Bay hosts tours that show land use that protects the environment and best-practices gardens, such as effective rain gardens. Visit ecosuperior.org to check on its events throughout the summer.

To find tours in your Big Lake neighborhood, visit regional horticultural or extension office sites, or check out local garden clubs.

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Michael Creger is the landscaper at home while his wife, Emily, takes on the vegetable gardening. He plans to eliminate most of the front yard in favor of perennials.