First Steps – Triage

As soon as the winter snow is gone from your garden, its time to inspect your landscaping for winter damage and make a check list for an early spring cleanup.  the advantage to starting early is that weeds and undesirable plants are not yet starting to grow. If you have perennials that bloom early, that is where you want to concentrate your first efforts with an eye toward protecting new growth. if you have a large garden, its a good idea to break it up into manageable sections that can be tackled in several two or three hour tasks.
My garden is approximately 8000 square feet about equally divided between lawn and shrub/flower beds. Early blooming plants include lilacs, azaelea, two dogwood trees and some large irises. These are the areas I will work on first, I chose to start with the azaelea plants first, so i grabbed my garden gloves and rake and empty trash barrel and set to it.  I raked all the dead leaves. removed small trees/large weeds growing within the azaeleas.  In this area is an overgrown lilac.  Lilacs need to be cut back quite a bit and mine had not been trimmed in years and grew to about twenty feet tall!  generally you should cut branches two inches or more in diameter.  At first, I was going to just trim the lilac overhang atop the azaelea.  A tree brach fell on the lilac bush and drove it into the azaeleas.  The branches that needed cutting were approximately four to six inched in diameter, so i decided to cut them back nearly to ground level using a tree saw.
I will revisit the lilac and trim more, Rome wasn’t built in  day afterall, probably not good to stress the plant too much at once. Next was the Flag Irises bed, green shoots are just begining to appear and since this flower bed is in a corner bordered by large rocks, it collected a great deal of leaves. There is also some Virginia Creeper that has grown in the are so i removed as much as possible with hedge shears.