Twice = since I have both white and red oaks the leaves for one get cleaned up in fall and the other in spring. I do remove daylily and iris foliage as I think it contributes to spot fungus and I believe they both like their roots chilled but sun warmed winter soils and like to go without mulch in winter. All the veggie beds get cleaned and tilled in fall so the chill will kill the critters trying to overwinter. Most years they also get sown with green manure though (winter grains). I wait for the last of the Beauty Berry shrubs' berries to be picked clean, the Chaste Tree berries fallen, the thornless blackberries' ugly canes bothering me, the grapes that no longer are interesting, and the Butterfly Bushes just barely putting out new leaves (about DH's birthday Feb. 19) before I hack them down quite severely. I never do anything in Nov., Dec., and Jan. since there are too many other things to do inside where it is warm. In Feb. I get antsy and go out for hours in anticipation of spring, or should I say "cabin fever"? The fruit trees get pruned then and the asters do too. When I notice the new green mum rosettes their dried uglies get whacked. I always forget about the spirea's pruning in fall so they just get taller every year because I don't want to miss their spring show. I do a lot of compost turning in winter and forget it in spring. I pile on leaves and end of harvest stuff but greens never make it there until spring weeding. Probably worthless endeavor in the winter but I like to run my tractor more in winter. Nancy the nancedar

Glad you've joined us, gayled, welcome to the NE forum! My DH and I are retired. We work together in the gardens... our spring techniques are pretty simple. 1. Clean up dead leaves and foliage and weed underneath plants... but not as early as we'd like this year. Probably not until April .... if we get more snow this week. 2. One of our earliest tasks every spring.... amend the soil. I think that's the best thing you can do for the gardens. We get free compost from our town.... dig it and take it. We've done this for the last eight years and it's really helped improve the gardens. While it's not exactly "organic" because the compost is made from garden waste that people bag and the city picks up, "free" makes it worthwhile. 3. We like to use bark mulch and I use cocoa mulch in a few special areas, but this has gotten expensive as our gardens have grown. We've found that the compost works like mulch by breaking down over the season. So we mulch every other year. 3. Fertilize? No, not even our roses. I think good soil is better than chemical applications. I learned about composting from my mother who was a wonderful gardener. Mom collected coffee grounds in one container (for her Mt. Laurels and rhododendrons) and egg shells & other wastes that she'd spread around her flower beds. Over 40 years of this gave her a yard with deep, dark soil and lots of worms. 4. My DH put in an irrigation system several years ago and he checks this early in the spring. We have a long yard with gardens down one side and around a garden shed. The days of dragging the hose around are gone for us. Molie

I hadn't seen a tag, but it was in there, just pushed deep into the soil. The variety is Carmencita. I didn't have a large clay pot, so I put it into the largest plastic pot I had (1 foot in diameter) and put a brick in the bottom under the soil to help weigh it down, and used a soil potting mix (not soilless) as it was heavier. .

The bugs are pretty lively here, and what I read in the news suggests they need all the friendly places they can find. Bees, bumblebees, hoverflies and other insects have been busy on the sarcococca and other flowering plants in the garden. I read to leave some plant litter, let some wild plants grow--many are attractive. Lord knows I have no difficulty following these instructions, as I like a wildish garden anyway, thinking it both the prettiest and the healthiest. And no -cides! Kitasei, good luck. We've been watering some, too. I'm hoping our lack of winter rains will be compensated for by spring precipitation, as we've had at times in the past few years. Sheila, my heavier pruning likely has to do with my climbers being twelve and fifteen years old and having accumulated a lot of aged wood, as I don't prune them all yearly: not enough time. A year ago I looked at 'Crepuscule' and realized that it was horribly overgrown and in need of drastic cutting back of old wood, but I couldn't remove all the old canes because there wouldn't be any rose left. I cut back 'Noella Nabonnand' very hard once, and it sulked for two or three years after that. So I learned a lesson. In the case of 'Crepuscule' I cut back a good portion of the oldest wood a year ago, but left enough so the rose wouldn't sulk; this time around I'm getting much of the rest of the most damaged growth, as there are now enough young canes to replace them. At least, I hope so. I hope to have a good, rejuvenated rose this year. 'Jaune Desprez' also needs heavy pruning, which I've been working on. Perma, good to meet another Houseman enthusiast, and thanks for the quote. Do you grow any of the native Florida violets? None are fragrant that I know of, unfornately, but there are some lovely ones. I remember some beautiful ones we had growing on the north side of my childhood home for a while: very pale, almost white, with a purple flush, long stems, spade-shaped light green leaves. There was also a light violet one with deeply cut leaves, uncommon. Those were the prettiest of several varieties growing wild locally, this in north Florida.