We are lucky to have had a slow, long spring so far to help us complete all those necessary gardening tasks.  This weekend, my husband and I worked on the vegetable garden.  We have a huge garden space and don’t need to plant the whole area every year, so last year we covered a portion of the garden with a large square of black plastic, hoping to reduce our weeding responsibility and it worked! Two weeks ago we moved the square to a different area and uncovered a wonderful, weed-free space for planting tomatoes and peppers this year.  He asked me on Friday night if there was a product that would cover the soil but allow water to penetrate to reduce weeding around the tomotoes and peppers this year.  I said, “Sure, landscape fabric or weed mat will do that.”  So, off to the garden center I went on Saturday morning to purchase the fabric.  We are trying two strategies: 1) leaving a 1′ wide open space for the planted tomatoes and 2) butting the lengths of fabric up to one another with the planted tomato in between.  We’ll see which works better.

Besides the vegetable garden, I cut back beauty berry shrubs and weeded a few landscape beds.  Two weekends ago, the main garden task was mowing meadows and using the “clippings” (which are full of leaves, chopped up stems, and lots of good organic matter) as mulch on landscape beds.   Other completed tasks this spring include: spraying glyphosate on honeysuckle before anything else came up; pruning back raspberries and blackberries; moving peonies into the vegetable garden to avoid deer browse so we can finally enjoy some flowers; cutting back warm season grasses (some with a mower and others with a weed eater); and weeding, weeding, weeding!

Spectacular plants this spring included: corylopisis (winterhazel) with their popcorn yellow hanging racemes, ‘Elizabeth’ magnolias with their pretty yellow blooms, hellebores in different shades of pink, rose and purples greeting us by the front door and a while ago we had a carpet of snow drops, with their nodding white flowers.