The first plantings
Sunday’s arrival of St. Patrick’s Day is the milepost that many long-time vegetable gardeners use to determine the season’s first planting – peas.
Peas are extremely cold-hardy and can go in the ground around here in late winter. They might not sprout until the ground warms a bit, but planting around St. Patty’s Day has them in place and ready to go at the first sign of spring.
A few other vegetables and flowers are cold-tough enough that they also can be planted outside as early as mid-March.
Onion sets and seeds of lettuce, spinach, and radishes are examples in the edible garden, while pansies, violas, dianthus, snapdragons, and dusty miller are usually safe bets for the last two weeks of March through early April.
Toward the end of March, it’s fine to plant transplants of lettuce, leeks, cabbage, broccoli, kale, parsley, and cauliflower in the vegetable garden as well as seed potatoes and seeds of red beets, kohlrabi, and carrots.
Whether you’re growing your own indoor-started plants or young plants bought from the garden center, it’s a good idea to “harden them off” before planting. That involves gradually introducing the plants to increasing light, wind and outdoor exposure over a 7- to 10-day period, bringing them inside at night for the first few days or if a sudden, dreadfully cold night shows up.
Sunday’s arrival of St. Patrick’s Day is the milepost that many long-time vegetable gardeners use to determine the season’s first planting – peas.
Stop that bad new bug
Now’s one of the best times to limit the spread of the newest imported bug that’s threatening to take a bite out of our landscape plants, not to mention the state’s grape-growing industry.
The spotted lanternfly first showed up in the U.S. in nearby Berks County in 2014, and regulators have been scrambling to stop its spread ever since.
The bug survives winter in the form of eggs, which adults lay on tree trunks, firewood, stones, vehicles, and potentially any solid, flat surface.
A great way to eradicate the next generation is by destroying these egg masses before they have a chance to hatch. That’s where you come in.
If you’re in one of the 13 Pennsylvania counties where the lanternfly has been confirmed, look around outside now for these masses.
The 13 lanternfly-confirmed counties are Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Chester, Delaware, Lancaster, Lebanon, Lehigh, Monroe, Montgomery, Northampton, Philadelphia and Schuylkill.
Egg masses look like a gray smear of mud with a waxy covering. Anywhere from 30 to 50 eggs could be in each mass.
Scrape the masses off the surfaces and into jars or plastic bags with a small amount of alcohol or hand sanitizer in order to kill the eggs. Just scraping them off and letting the masses drop to the ground won’t do the trick.
See a Penn State Extension video on how to scrape spotted lanternfly egg masses
Even if you’re not in one of the 13 lanternfly-confirmed counties, be on the lookout for egg masses (and the eventual adult lanternflies) to help document where and how the bugs are moving.
If you think you’ve seen them, call 1-888-4BADFLY (422-3359) or report a sighting on Penn State Extension’s lanternfly website. That same site has identification photos and details.
One other thing you can do – get rid of any trees of Heaven on your property. Those are vigorous invaders anyway that are a favorite host plant for lanternfly egg-laying.
The spotted lanternfly adult, which is active from mid-summer into early fall, is distinctive for its lower pair of spotted red wings. Adults pierce trunks, branches and vines, causing a mix of sap and “honeydew” (bug poop) that draws other insects and grows a potentially deadly sooty-mold fungus.
The bug is a particular threat to grapes, fruit trees, and a variety of hardwood trees, including cherry, beech, maple, and walnut.
The lawn will be greening and growing again before we know it. One thing you can do now is get the mower ready.
Get ready for grass time
The lawn will be greening and growing again before we know it.
One thing you can do now is get the mower ready, if you didn’t do it at the end of last season.
Replace the spark plug. Clean gunk and grass clippings from the engine and under-carriage. Clean and sharpen the blade. Replace the fuel filter, and clean or replace the air filter. Change the oil. Drain any old gas, and add fresh gas right before cutting for the first time.
Something else to think about … if you’re hiring out lawn care and/or mowing, now’s the time to make the calls and have a plan in place.
Get your bids now so the service is ready to go when the grass needs to be cut and fertilized and when crabgrass preventer should go down (late March to early April).
A third lawn job that can be done soon is planting new grass seed. End of March through April is one of the year’s two best time frames for starting grass.
A lot of gardeners have dead patches to repair from last fall’s grub damage. (Grubs are the soil-dwelling larval stage of beetles and can kill grass by eating the roots out from underneath.)
Others are seeing trails of dead lawn that are the result of vole tunneling under snow.
Voles are mouse-like rodents that normally don’t venture out into open lawns because of fear of being eaten by hawks and other predators. But under snow in winter, these voracious plant-eaters make surface tunnels in the lawn that look like curvy pathways built by drunken road crews.
Lawns usually recover from vole-tunnel damage on their own, but you can speed up the repair by raking and tamping grass seed into the tunnels.
The longer-term problem is what to do about the voles. They eat perennial-flower roots, shrub roots, flower bulbs, and bark from the base of trees, shrubs, and evergreens in addition to lawn roots.
Vole-control options include: 1.) Get or borrow a cat to hunt them; 2.) Try repelling them with one of the host of sprays, granules, and concoctions sold in garden centers; 3.) Trap them using cage traps baited with peanut butter, or 4.) Kill them by setting mouse or rat traps baited with peanut butter perpendicular along active runs.
And finally, if you’re seeing large rounded areas where the lawn is matted down and grayish in color, that’s probably snow mold.
Snow mold is a fungal condition that reveals itself in late winter as the snow melts. This is one that usually fixes itself once warmer weather and sunny days show up.
The difference between this and grub damage is that snow mold affects the blades and not the crowns (growth points) and roots. That allows new blades to emerge.
With grub damage, grubs have killed the lawn by eating the roots, resulting in dead patches that pull up like pieces of loose carpet.
Help a snow-mold lawn recover by raking off the dead blades and any other leaves or debris preventing sun from reaching the soil surface.