Spring is still 36 days away, but my head is already in the garden.  On Monday, I turned in an article on witch hazel, one of my favorite plants, which was also the subject of last week’s blog post.  Mine is close to blooming (the buds have a distinct yellow color), but it’s not quite there yet.  If you’d like to read a bit more about witch hazel, check out the article on the UVM website here:  https://tinyurl.com/3wara5c5 .

Today, I’m thinking about all the things I want to get done and trying to prioritize those that are best done sooner rather than later.  I’ve learned that putting off an unpleasant or difficult task likely will make that task more so later on—like weeding when I’d rather be doing almost anything else.  That’s usually true where snow is concerned, too.  While the bigger a weed gets, the harder it is to pull, the longer snow sits, the heavier it is to move and icier it gets on the ground. 

This morning, I spent a while outside clearing the front steps of snow from this past weekend’s snowstorm.  There’s another one coming, so even though I don’t use that door often, I like to keep it relatively clear just in case it’s needed.  That done, I took a look at the volunteer rugosa roses near the stairs I usually use.  I’d intended to dig the volunteers up last year, but waited a bit too long, and before I knew it, they’d not only leafed out but were full of buds—with bumble bees and other pollinators happily flitting from flower to flower.  So, I left them for another year and let the pollinators enjoy them. 

Volunteer rugosa roses in bloom last summer. How could I
cut them back when the bees were enjoying them so much?

The bushes grew so much during the summer that their branches (full of tiny thorns) arched out over the driveway, making shoveling and cleaning off the car a hazard.  So, once I’d cleared the snow, I grabbed a pair of pruners and cut back a good bit of those volunteer roses—as much as I could with a foot or so of their base covered in the white stuff.  While I wasn’t able to cut them back as much as I’d like, this will make it much easier come spring to finish the job and dig them up for planting elsewhere (and a lot less dangerous walking by for the time being). 

While out there, I took a look around at things I need to do, some plant-related, some general maintenance.  The list looks intimidating, but I have time to prioritize the work so that I won’t feel overwhelmed my first day back in the garden.  Who knows, maybe I can tackle some more bits and pieces before the real work begins.

It felt good to do some garden work outdoors today, even if it was for just a short while and only a small start on the work to come.  For the next several weeks, at least, this is how it will be:  a little outdoor work, some inside get-ready-to-garden work, and a lot of planning and dreaming. 

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