Photo by María Helena Carey
Whether you’re an expert gardener or a tenderfoot, this is an exciting but tricky time of year. Perhaps you followed the advice of my earlier column that made you get off your duff and get seeds started indoors; or perhaps you had it all figured out before then and, greenhouse all set up, you are eager to start moving your beautiful little plants outdoors and getting your impatiens prettifying your front door and your veggies growing already. Or, late bloomer that you are, perhaps you are looking at seed packets and dreaming of corn and tomatoes and pumpkins and hearing how they need a long growing season but then you read that ominous warning, “Plant when all danger of frost has passed.”
Yikes! Frost? How can we be thinking of frost when we’ve had days in the high 80s?
Well, believe it, friend: spring is a fickle mistress and temperatures can still dip quite a lot in the early mornings, killing those plants that do not like to grow in the cold or which are transplants from warmer regions of the world.
I talked to Matthew Roberts of Ginkgo Gardens, and his single most crucial piece of advice is, “Have patience and wait.”
You may be confused and that’s okay. Let me explain:
As you may know or recall from my last installment, DC is in zone 7a. This means that we may still be within a tricky time of year called the Last Frost Date — an arbitrary date based on previous measurements that struggles to figure out when we’ll stop having cold snaps. Matthew tells me that with two wildly diverging frost dates from reliable sources — March 29 from the Horticultural Society of America and April 21 from the National Weather Service — he has stuck to using Tax Day (April 15) as his last frost date for his gardening purposes.
Okay, we figured out frost dates — now what? Well, go sit on your bottom! Believe it or not, your tuckus can be an excellent tool for knowing when the soil is ready to house your tomatoes and peppers. If you get chilly when you sit, your tomatoes will be cold too — this can cause plants to get stunted and not ever produce as well as you’d hoped.
So what can you do in this small window of waiting, then? Well, you can rejuvenate your soil! From large scale replacing of soil in every pot in your house to just mixing in some compost in the upper third, you have to remember that even the smallest garden is a living organism that benefits from getting new nutrients coming into the system. Adding earthworms can do this for you without your lifting a finger, too!
If you have any specific questions about what gets planted when, make sure you stop by Ginkgo Gardens, located at 911 11th Street, SE, and chat with Matthew. He is incredibly nice and knowledgeable, and he will get you excited about gardening.