Early Spring Gardening

By Sarah Pugh

February is the time when Victorians start to think it's spring, and do spring things. Many of us are tempted to garden. We're inspired by the snowdrops and crocuses, and we want to get a jump on the gardening season. After all, what's the point of living in Victoria if you can't phone your relatives or (former) friends in Ontario and brag about your garden in February?

Well, hold on a moment. There ARE things you can do in February, in your garden. Sadly, planting tomatoes is not one of them. Most of the very early spring/late winter garden tasks are of the tidying and preparation variety. Still, they will get you outdoors, and playing in the dirt – and in Canada, that's a lot to ask for.

The first thing you can do is make sure that the shrubs you ought to have pruned last fall have been done. This includes roses – early spring is actually the best time to prune. Do not, however, prune fruit trees in the spring, as they set their buds–which become flowers, which become fruit in the fall, and pruning will remove many of these, reducing your yield.

Now is an excellent time to turn your compost, too (especially since it's less stinky when it's cold!) and you can then mulch your roses and shrubs with it. It's also an ideal time to start a compost if you haven't got one.

The humans in Victoria enjoy the mild winters, but the weeds enjoy them even more. If you didn't heavily mulch your flower and vegetable beds last fall, chances are you've got a good crop of chickweed, dandelions, mustards and other greens volunteering their services. If you're like me, you call this a “cover crop”, pick what's edible for salads, and then pull it all out when it's time to actually put seeds in. However, if such unplanned and undisciplined greenery in your beds offends you, by all means indulge in a good session of weeding. Just make sure to mulch well afterwards – bare, unprotected earth is easily compacted by rains, making it harder for your wee plants to get their roots down when it comes time.

The final preparation you may want to make for your garden is an investment in some mason bees. These are great pollinators that appear before honey bees in the spring to pollinate early-blooming fruit trees like pears and cherries. They are available from a Vancouver company called Beediverse, or you can put up your own nests to attract them. They are solitary, but they like neighbours. Typically, they prefer tubular nests approximately 6 inches long and less than half an inch in diameter. You can buy premade nests from garden centres or Beediverse, or you can make your own with plastic straws or bamboo. Each tube must be blocked at one end, and you will want more than twenty tubes gathered together somehow, placed in a dry sunny spot in your garden. (And remember, NEVER use pesticides – they may kill what you want them to, but they'll cause a lot of collateral damage to the local bee populations.)

All this tidying and preparation may slake your gardening lust to some degree. But there is always that urge to go out and PLANT things. And here, in the sheltered frostlessness (mostly) of James Bay, you may. Plant peas in your vegetable garden and sweet peas in your flower beds. Plant pansies and other hardy flowers. Sow lettuce seeds and other salad greens – they grow so quickly you are more than likely to get a couple salads out of them even if we are hit with a late frost. And if you have space indoors someplace coolish, and enough light, you can start a few things at the end of February: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil. It's a good idea to put a fan on the tomatoes so they don't get too leggy – even with plenty of light, in the absence of wind they tend to get quite spindly.

Come March, it's time for more cool-weather crops to go in, and hardy little troopers like radishes, and then the real work, the everyday weeding, the watering, the thinning... on second thought, it might be nice just to rest up in February so you have energy for the rest of the season!