Some say “spring,” others “mud season.” But no matter what you call it, change is in the air. That three-inch layer of ice in your driveway is either gone, or soon will be. With the winter blanket gone, it’s time to tend to that which has lay beneath or poked through the surface during the long cold months behind us.

The Lawn
Robert “Bob” Beyfuss, an agriculture and natural resources educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Greene County, has recommendations for every corner of your property as well as the vast stretches in between—otherwise known as the lawn.

“You really want to stay off your lawn until the ground is completely thawed out and no longer freezing. Walking on it can compact the lawn and cause problems,” says Beyfuss. “A lot of people think it’s necessary to fertilize the lawn as soon as it turns green in April. That is really not necessary. The first lawn fertilization should take place around Memorial Day—you might want to wait.” This, he explains, is because the snow that’s blanketed your lawn has fertilizing properties. “Snow has been called the poor man’s fertilizer,” says Beyfuss. “As the snow percolates through the atmosphere, which is 78 percent nitrogen, it tends to pick up some…and tends to store that nitrogen as snow or as moisture.”

But why should we stay off the grass this early in the season, you ask?

“As the soil starts to thaw out and refreezes at night, you’ve got a squishy zone in the roots. That is a very, very wet condition. If you’ve got any clay in the soil, as most places around here do, it compacts. With wet roots, freezing and thawing on a frequent basis, you really should stay off it. As you compact the clay, you cut off the oxygen to the roots.” Beyfuss recommends staying off the lawn until it’s time to start mowing.

Pruning Fruit Trees
Can’t wait to start cutting? You’re in luck. This is the time to prune fruit trees. “Most do require some pruning,” says Beyfuss. “Apple trees probably require the most pruning every year.”

Ah, but how? I once asked a group of apple farmers how to prune some wild-growing trees on my property. Most kept quiet. Some muttered. “With a chainsaw,” offered one.

Beyfuss says apple trees are trained to the central leader or stem, with branches radiating out at 90 degrees. Three or more branches coming off a main steam at the same point is called a whorl. “Ideally, if they’re growing in four directions, those are four branches that can bear fruit for you,” he says. “You want to make sure that the light will get into the center of the tree. You want to go after the shorter sprouts that grow up and down out of other branches. They’re not going to bear fruit and they’re going to shade the rest of the tree.”

He says you can prune apple trees as early as January, but some folks wait until April.

As for how much to prune? Beyfuss had a professor at Cornell University who advised to keep cutting until you could something about the size of a basketball through it.

When it comes to stone fruit—peaches, cherries and plums—branches should be pruned to have a fan shape with a number of branches coming off the central leader, he says. “For stone fruit you want to concentrate on taking off broken or diseased or crossing branches that are rubbing on each other…or growing back into the center of the tree,” says Beyfuss. “Even with peach trees, you wait until after it flowers. If you wait until June, you can prune with an eye to how much fruit you’ll end up with. If you wait until June, you’re going to avoid a disease that affects open wounds on all stone fruit trees.”

“The crucial time for all fruit trees is the first four or five years that they’re in the ground. If the tree has not been properly pruned, it may take two or three years of training. I know some people who will buy a bearing fruit tree and then cut it back—commercial orchards will do that. They’ll buy their trees in the spring and cut them back to what’s called a whip,” he says.

As for shade trees, Beyfuss says to make them grow bigger, you prune them now to stimulate growth. “Pine trees produce what are known as candles. The branches will elongate and you pinch those in May for new growth,” he says.

Look to the Bushes
Ready to prune, but have no trees to cultivate? Look towards the bushes.

“For shrubs, there are two types of flowering shrubs, those that you prune in June and July and those that you prune from July on,” says Beyfuss. “With all of our spring-flowering shrubs, that flower by June, you want to prune after they flower or you’d be pruning off the buds,” he says. “One thing you can do is a drastic rejuvenation pruning with forsythia, flowering quince or spirea, sometimes called briadl wreath. These and a number of other spring shrubs can be cut right back to almost ground level and will respond with an awful lot of growth that you can train the habit of to look a little bit differently. It won’t flower that year…(but) cut it back to the ground and within two years you should have a more manageable shrub with a lot more flowers on it.”

This sort of pruning is appropriate for large shrubs such as forsythia, that are only flowering on the outer edge. Beyfuss adds that there’s little worry of any permanent damage for plants that bloom early, such as forsythia responding to a warm spell in December.

For summer flowering shrubs, such as rose of sharon, buddleia or butterfly bush, he says March heading into April is the time to prune. “You’re wounding a plant by pruning it,” he says. “You’re subjecting, possibly, to winter damage. It might freeze solid, but generally by March the coldest weather is past.”

Berries!
“Blueberries are also pruned in late March or early April. You’re basically removing the oldest one or two canes,” says Beyfuss. “They produce most of their fruit on canes that are two or three years old. Removing the canes that are six or seven years old at ground level will encourage new growth.”

Also suggested for blueberries is a construction of a simple cage around them that will keep furry or feathered friends out. “If you want to harvest blueberries, you want to construct a frame that you can drape some bird netting over,” says Beyfuss.

“Strawberries, if you’ve got them mulched with straw—which you’re supposed to do, you want to get that off in March or mid April at high elevations, because they want the sun. The buds are actually formed during last fall. It’s a matter of getting those plants growing and flowering so you can have strawberries in June.

Pruning grapes is a little less straightforward. “Pruning grapes is really an art,” says Beyfuss. “It’s something that’s hard to teach and depends so much on the vigor of any individual grape vine. If you’ve got a concord grape vine growing leaps and bounds, you’ve got to prune that quite severely. A seedless table grape, you might want to prune very gently.”

Beyfuss explains that grapes produce their fruit on growth out of last year’s growth. “Prune last year’s back to two buds and you’ll get new growth,” he says. Like blueberries, these shoots of new growth are also called canes.

Raspberries, on the other hand, produce their berries on last year’s canes. So Beyfuss says it’s a matter of thinning the raspberries out. “You should only leave about three canes per linear foot,” he says. You want to leave the most vigorous canes (and) top them at about four or five feet. A lot of people trellis them. You can get up to a quart of raspberries per season per cane for those that summer harvest in July. Fall raspberries, you harvest in September, you might mow right back down to the ground in March—you’re probably not going to see them in the highest elevation.”

Vegetable Gardening
When it comes to vegetable gardening, Beyfuss says that now is the time to test leftover seeds for viability with the following simple test: Lay 10 seeds between two moist paper towels in a plastic bag and place it somewhere warm, such as on top of a refrigerator. After about two weeks, see how many have sprouted.

“Corn seed will last about two seasons. After that the viability of corn tends to drop off,” he says. “Others depend on the vegetable and how they’ve been stored. If you’ve stored them in a cool, dark location, those will be fine for five years. The only way to know is to test them. With corn, if you’re getting 60 percent germination you might want to plant more heavily. New seed might say 91 percent germination on the package.” At higher elevations, Beyfuss recommends seventy-day corn because of the shorter growing seasons in towns like Hunter and Windham.

On a related note, he says many folks start their seeds indoors too early. “We’re sick of winter and desperate to have something growing,” he says. “It takes four to eight weeks to grow a vigorous transplant. If you start too early, and they’re growing in cell packs for eight, nine or 10 weeks, the root system will be seriously compromised,” he says. “Put them out there and they might die or go into transplant shock.”

Transplant tomatoes in the middle of May, or June where it’s colder, he says, adding “You wouldn’t want to start those seeds until the middle of April.”

Cucumbers, melons and squash need only grow in starter trays for four weeks. “Peppers take eight or nine weeks to get ready,” he says, adding, “they like it a little bit warmer. I might start them a week or two before the tomatoes.”

“I don’t plant according to the calendar but according to the soil,” he says. “Lettuce or spinach are early crops and can be planted when the ground is close to 50 degrees, sweet corn over 60 degrees.”

“Lots of times we plant our plants too early and they sit there and look at us, and then we think they’ve got diseases,” he says.

Getting Your Equipment in Order
Of course winter’s end is also a prime time to get your garden and landscaping equipment in proper order. That can mean applying linseed oil to your wooden handles and tuning up your motor-driven ones, but it should also mean sterilizing things like tomato cages.

“A lot of diseases are spread from year to year,” says Beyfuss. “I recommend making a diluted solution of one cup household bleach in a gallon of water, then really scrubbing down tomato cages or stakes and even your tools. For years I battled with a blight, then I scrubbed my tools….”

There’s some garden preparation for which the optimum time has already passed, and that’s the clearing of debris out of your vegetable garden. “Insects and diseases tend to survive the winter on debris. All of that stuff is harvesting pests and it should be gone, gone, gone and out of the garden,” says Beyfuss. “If you do compost it, I probably wouldn’t use it in the garden. Vegetable compost should perhaps be used on your flower garden. It’s the same process for your flowers. That (compost) you can use on your vegetable garden because they’re not related.”

Invasive Species and Pests
As for so-called invasive exotic species, Beyfuss has a fairly positive approach. When it comes to purple loosestrife, a better known pest with pretty purple flowers that has spread like a plague through this region, he says don’t plant it, don’t propagate it, and don’t bring it home.

But as for other suspect plants, he has different advice. “It doesn’t have to be a native plant. It just has to not be a problem down the road. There are some we used to consider good ornamental species that have escaped cultivation and become weeds…(and) if that native plant won’t grow, what’s the point? My philosophy is plant the right plant in the right place and it will do well for you.”

“Before you try to eradicate something on your property, you should have a good idea of what will replace it,” he says. “I think people should focus more on what they want to grow and less on what they don’t want to grow.”

Pests of other sorts, such as the Asian Long Horn Beetle, pose a threat to standing timber. But they have not so far made it this far north. “A lot of city people that come up here, for them getting rid of trees and wood in the city is hard to do,” says Beyfuss. “A maple tree downs in their their yard and they bring the wood up to burn in the their campfires.” This is how diseases and pests are potentially spread, so it’s best to secure firewood locally to where it will be burned.

And, for those who recall and shudder at the thought of caterpillar swarms as in the summer of 2006 thinking what’s the point of planning outside plantings?, Beyfuss isn’t expecting many outbreaks. “I think the populations have crashed,” he says.

For more information about gardening and planting, contact your local office of the Cornell Cooperative Extension. Greene County’s office can be reached at 518 622 9820.