The garden, she is calling me

{in honor of Saint Patrick's Day, which is about beer but I'm choosing it to be about things green}

Ahh, spring. Much of this season leaves me melancholy. But not my garden. No, she is my best friend starting yesterday, and we will be BFFs until November.

This happens every year. We break up, we reconcile, we break up...you get the idea.

In case you didn't know what a gigantic geek I am, I will let you in on a little secret. I have a Master Gardener certificate. I took the class at the cooperative extension.

Yes, I am that big of a garden geek.

The funny thing is, there's a lot about plants and growing that I don't know! If it's a subject I don't care about, like for instance, vegetables, then I push it out of my mind.

But if it's flowers? Oh, yeah. Then I'm in.

I've moved a lot in my adult life. I moved ten times in ten years until I bought my current house, where I've been for six years! SIX! That's like eternity in Heather Time. My point in talking about all those moves is to tell you that each time I moved into a new house, decorating the yard was my top priority. And each time my neighbors would watch me quizically and eventually say something like "huh, you really like to garden, don't you?" And then they's inevitably get around to what they really wanted to know. "Um, do you know when it's ok to cut back my mums?"

Mums seem to mystify most home gardeners. I'll tell you why later.

I'm here to share a tidbit of garden information for you. This is for people gardening in zones 5-7. If you're in a hotter climate, I have no clue. If you're colder than this, add an extra month to this time frame.

When you start to see the first green buds of leaves sprouting at the base of your mum plants, you can cut back all of the dead branches from last fall and rake them out very carefully. With spring soils thawing and rains soaking the dirt, they can very easily lift up altogether, and that would not be good.

So be careful, but go ahead and hack away at the deadness now.

Then I usually tamp down the earth around the rootball a little, just for good measure. Not too much, don't want to compact the soil or anything.

Then I move on to all the other plants like mums that need this same treatment. Asters, daisies, Russian sage, salvia, yarrow, hostas. The exception? Lavender. Don't cut the branches of your lavender yet, even if it looks dead as dead can be. It takes a while for lavender to come back and even the most dead branches will surprise you in a few months.

So that's the mum story. Here's the other secret to mums...

They do better when they're planted in the spring. You can buy the most teensy tiny mum for 99 cents now, and by fall it will not only be big and beautiful and bloom like the dickens, it will actually live through the winter!

It drives me nuts, how garden stores only set out mums in full bloom in the fall. That's fine, they're pretty and all. But they don't do well when they're planted in the fall. They don't like to overwinter with wet feet (i.e. a damp, snowy spot that doesn't drain well) and they're liable to die on you.

So if you plant them now, you can save yourself a bunch of money and more work next year. Just a little tip about mums.

Wow. I am a gigantic geek, aren't I?