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Your Spring Garden Checklist
* Prepare beds for summer vegetables and flowers.
* Dig and divide summer and fall flowering perennials, bulbs, and rhizomes before they emerge and begin their spring growth.
* Order caladium tubers. Fertilize azaleas and camellias after they finish blooming.
* Try using Osmocote Outdoor & Indoor Smart Release Plant Food for easy and effective rose feeding. Plant container-grown roses, shrubs, and trees.
* Plant dahlia tubers in rich, well-drained soil.
* Begin planting hardy vegetables such as eggplant, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers.
* Repot houseplants that have outgrown their containers.
* Fertilize pansies for a final flush of blooms.
* Begin to set out summer annuals in mid to late March.
* Begin to seed Bermuda grass and sod St. Augustine.
* Take advantage of your last chance to sow seeds of cosmos, larkspur, and poppies.
* Turn compost and add a little fertilizer to it.
* Do preventative treatment for black spot and mildew with a fungicide such as Fertilome Systemic Fungicide. It is easier to prevent infection than to stop once it has started.
* Watch for aphids, lace bugs, and scale insects on azaleas, and treat immediately before infestation becomes severe.
APRIL/MAY
* It is too late for bare root stock, but container-grown and B&B (balled and burlapped) specimens are plentiful.
* Look over established annuals and perennials, and deadhead to perpetuate blooming.
* Watch for black spot on roses and treat with a fungicide such as Fertilome Systemic Fungicide when symptoms appear.
* After they finish blooming, prune climbing roses, forsythia, quince, and Indian hawthorn.
* Some evergreen plants shed old leaves this time of year, so don’t be alarmed if leaves on your magnolias, photinia, abelia, ligustrum, gardenia, and pittosporum turn yellow and drop off.
