March Winds Down and Garden Activity Goes Up
March 24 - March 30, 2025
Weekly journal of a Midwest gardener…
Monday, March 24, 2025
Oh, bright and sunny day. Why dost thou blow such a cold wind in Spring? I ended up with a few last-minute, unplanned items to attend to, so I only got as far as making labels for the seeds I wanted to sow today.1 I did get a text from my older sister that she sowed her peas today. I also tended to the pansies and violas, which are growing and flowering nicely.2
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Oh, cold and cloudy day. What have you done with Spring? The chill in the air and the light rain in the afternoon made it a good day for lunch out and book shopping. I went to Half-Price Books and found a gardening book published in 1987 by an author who was previously unknown to me. When I got home, it started to lightly rain, so instead of sowing seeds out in the garden, I did a bit of research on the author of my new-to-me book and started to get ready for a presentation on Lost Ladies of Garden Writing that I’m doing in April via Zoom for the Herb Society of America.3
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Oh, clear and frosty morning. Will you ever allow Spring her glory? And then, just like that, I went out into the back garden and discovered the spring beauties, Claytonia virginica, were all blooming. Spring is returning with her glory. If you are not familiar with it, the spring beauty wildflower is a multi-happiness-generating flower!4 I am thrilled that they’ve come back two years in a row after I transplanted some to my garden in 2023.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Oh, clear skies with lots of sun! Yes, I heard the call to go out to the garden and changed my plans to do just that. I sowed seeds for radishes, lettuce, kale, and spinach, plus I planted some onion sets for red onions.5 I also planted the peony root I bought on Sunday, and cut back some spireas to rejuvenate them and keep them on the smaller side. Finally, I put out my rain gauge for the season, and I posted on my blog to provide links to various interviews I’ve done lately that are now popping up on the internet.6
Friday, March 28, 2025
Oh, glorious preview of early summer. Sunny with a high temperature of around 81F though the wind reminded me it was still March. I spent just an hour or so doing a bit of gingerly weeding, gingerly because I didn’t want to get my clothes dirty. The rest of the time, I was running errands and recording another podcast episode. I also stopped at my sister’s condo to cut back her spireas and then texted with another sister about her lawn problem, which I am mystified by.7 Of course, since it was Friday, I also watered and fertilized the pansies and violas.8
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Oh, I am tired of starting this week’s snippets with “Oh.” In the morning, I harvested the last of the microgreens, at least for a while, and cleaned out all the containers. The fungus gnats had discovered them again and were (are) annoying me. I put out some new sticky traps to stop the gnats literally in their tracks, plus filled a few old yogurt containers with apple cider vinegar to lure them to their deaths by drowning. I need those gnats to be gone before everyone comes over for Easter. Gone!
Sunday, March 30, 2025
.11 inches of rain in the rain gauge this morning.9 When I stepped outside to check the rain gauge, I swear the birds were chirping, “Weirdo, weirdo, weirdo.” I decided not to take offense. I’m sure they weren’t referring to me, the one who planted the very trees they were sitting in, the one who has a lawn full of earthworms and other bugs for them to eat, not to mention lots of flowers with seedheads, the one who has bird baths and bird feeders for them, the one who planted large shrubs and evergreens for them to hide in when hawks appear. No, they could not have been alerting anyone to my presence in the garden with that refrain!
That’s a Week!
I wrote several weeks ago that March came in like a cold, little lamb. It appears it will be going out like a lion. As I write this entry, the weather forecast calls for rain and possibly severe weather later in the evening, about the time this newsletter goes out. I hope wherever you are, you’ll be safe, dry, and happily anticipating a new week and a new month.
Quotable
March 25, 2025 was the 100th anniversary of the author Flannery O’Connor’s birth, so in her honor, I bought a book of her letters at HPB.10 The following quote from one of her letters wasn’t in the book I purchased but was highlighted in Letters of Note, another Substack I subscribe to.
“The review in Time was terrible, nearly gave me apoplexy… It was written I understand by the lady who writes about gardening. They shouldn’t have taken her away from the petunias.” - Flannery O’Connor, Letter to Ben Griffith, 9th July 1955
Yes, I sometimes stray away from the petunias, but I always come back to them!
Have a great gardening week!
Where Else to Find Me and How to Support Me
My home base is my website. My main blog is still May Dreams Gardens.
Listen to me on the weekly podcast, The Gardenangelists. A new episode drops every Wednesday, and we now are also on YouTube.
Check out Lost Ladies of Garden Writing, another interest I have. I publish a new post every other Wednesday.
Follow me on Instagram to read letters to my garden and see some pretty pictures of flowers and the occasional reel.
Buy one or more of my five humorous yet helpful gardening books or one of my two children’s books to add to your library.
Purchase something from affiliate links (usually books, occasionally products on Amazon.) If you do, I earn a tiny commission, and it doesn’t cost you anything more.
Most of all, please share this newsletter with other gardeners who might find it interesting.
Thank you!
If. you are interested, we can also just chat via the Substack app. The first question I posted to start us off is, “What’s in your garden today?” Who knows, that might be the only question because the answer changes every day, doesn’t it?
On the list to sow this week are one variety of spinach, one variety of turnip greens, two varieties of kale, four varieties of radishes, and too many varieties of lettuce. Each row will be about three feet long, so it sounds like a lot, and maybe it is, but it will just be 16 rows of spring greens when I’m done. (Did you do the math? Eight varieties of lettuce is the correct answer.)
Late Monday, I also finished listening to The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. If you gave me a test, I’d probably get a solid C because there were times when I was listening to the audiobook without really paying attention as I should have. But geez… it was 30 hours long! I also finished the jigsaw puzzle I was working on.
The presentation to the Herb Society of America is free to society members. Non-members can watch for $10. A bargain. The presentation is on April 22nd at 1:00 pm Eastern time. Here’s a link to register.
I wrote a few years ago about why I love spring beauties. You can read all about it in this blog post from April 2023.
The onions I sowed seeds for last week are just starting to germinate indoors.
If you aren’t a subscriber to my regular blog posts, why not? That’s a rhetorical question! Here’s a link if you’d like to listen to or read one of the interviews I’ve done lately.
Here are the known facts bout my sister’s lawn issues. Both her lawn and her daughter’s elsewhere in the same neighborhood are almost completely dead. She can pull up grass hunks easily, no roots. When she digs around the edges where it is still green, she doesn’t find a bunch of grubs, just earthworms. She did not notice a bunch of Japanese beetles last year, nor were there moths hovering around the lawn in late summer. No other lawns in the neighborhood, other than her daughter’s, look like hers. She and her daughter use the same lawn service. Hmmm… I suggested soil testing, a call to the county extension service to see if they have someone who could look at it, having the lawn service company come out and explain what they applied last fall, and having another lawn care service come and give a quote. And, definitely don’t apply any pre-emergent herbicides because they will probably need to reseed their lawns this spring.
A common question is, what do I use for fertilizer for my container plantings? I mostly choose water-soluble organic fertilizers for the containers. I am currently trying out Elm Dirt’s Bloom Juice. Also, if I remember to do so, I’ll mix a little all-purpose organic fertilizer, like this one, into the soil when I’m planting. (Eons ago, I went to a garden bloggers’ event, and they were giving out free bags of organic fertilizer. Most of the other attendees had flown to the event and didn’t want to take the fertilizer back with them on the plane or put it in their suitcases, so they gave their bags to me. I ended up with about 12 bags of fertilizer, each about five pounds. I finally used the last of it this spring to add to the containers of pansies and violas.
Oh, I promise never to write a version of this newsletter again by starting each day with the same word and type of sentence.
I enjoy reading letters, those written exchanges between two people that neither thought would be published. But then, they did keep those letters, so maybe they thought they might be published one day. I also like diaries and epistolary novels. So when I saw Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends on the 100th anniversary of her birth I bought it.
A busy but joyous time of year.