Feels like spring? Impetuous gardeners turn impatient

April 2, 2011

On the first spring-like day, impatience adds a layer of urgency to an impetuous gardener's nature. Of course, I've been buying garden seeds since January 1^st – and I want to plant them all now. Recently I visited a nursery near our new town and was all set to start loading two flats of smiling pansies and bright-petaled primroses into a garden cart. But then something went boing! in my head. (The boing-ing isn’t unusual, but a sensible boing! is not typical for me.)

Springtime plants were not displayed on the nursery’s outdoor wooden benches. Those benches held raspberry and blackberry plants. (I want to grow raspberries, too! But buy a blackberry plant? Dude. I moved from a small suburb near Seattle, and, there, if a tiny blackberry seed takes root on your property, you will spend the next twenty years hacking brambles.

Anyway, the pansies and primroses were for sale inside the nursery, in a warm, dry room reserved for indoor plants. That was a clue, and explained the boing! in my head. Still…. Is it too early to plant pansies and primroses in my garden, I asked a nursery employee. He could easily have led me straight down the garden path and sold me two dozen pots of spring blooms. Instead, this honorable young man said I should wait another month, so the little guys won’t freeze in the soil.

In thirty years of making gardens, I have seldom left a nursery empty-handed. So, although I regretfully decided to delay buying the pansies and primroses, I stocked up on sweet pea seeds. Such evocative names on the packets:Jewels of Albion,Velvet Elegance, April in Paris. And wild birds can never have too many sunflowers, so I added those seeds to my basket. Plus one packet of antique French pumpkin seeds: Cinderella’s Carriage. (I passed on the packet of Wyatt’s Wonder Giant Pumpkin seeds, though. Enthusiasm and exuberance, yes; delusions of horticultural wizardry, no.)

By the time I had paid for my seeds, the nursery's owner had returned. So, was your staff member correct about waiting to buy pansies and primroses, I asked her. And when can I plant my sweet pea seeds here in north Idaho? And hollyhock seeds? What about perennial plants? And vegetable starts? And do you have fruit trees? And flowering crabapple trees? I flung out the questions with all the dignity of a golden retriever puppy. Before she could get me sorted out, she was needed in the nursery’s gift shop.I waited in her office and interviewed her associate, Abe, a gold and white short-haired cat, who was rescued and adopted as a companion for long-time employee Gypsy, a black, short-haired mouser. (I met Gypsy last fall, when she hitched a ride in my garden cart immediately after I had placed three catmint plants in the wagon.)

When the owner returned, she found Abe on my lap, purring like a well-tuned engine and trying to turn upside down for a tummy rub. “Watch out,” she warned. “Abe will pee on your lap if he gets too happy.” I am relieved to report that Abe made his exit from my lap well short of ecstasy, but with every promise of a continuing mutual friendship.

Here is a nursery owner's timetable for safe planting in Garden Zone 5 – with this caveat: We are all at the mercy of the weather. The last frost date is traditionally May 15^th here, but we all know what a jokester Mother Nature can be.

• Plant in early April: Strawberries, Raspberries, Blackberries, Rhubarb, Bare-root Fruit Trees (Lee and I have to go back soon with the truck!), Lilacs, Flowering Trees, Shade Trees, Seed Potatoes, Asparagus Roots
• Mid-to late April: Pansies, Primroses, Sweet Pea and Hollyhock seeds, Peas
• Early May: Beans, Squash, Perennial Flowering Plants, Hardy Vegetable Starts
• June: Tomato plants and other tender plant starts

Of course, she added, many gardeners have been starting their seeds indoors since February. I tried to look as if I, too, had seedlings sprouting in my greenhouse…if I had a greenhouse…or even a cleared-off top of my clothes dryer. Instead, I silently repeated my mantra: Next year, I will start my seeds in February. Indoors.

One of the biggest challenges to growing things successfully in north Idaho is “the combination of relatively cool (especially night time temperatures), dry summers, and schizophrenic winter weather,” says Paul Warnick, horticulturalist at the University of Idaho Arboretum and Botanical Garden.

Schizophrenic winter weather? Two days after I visited the nursery – on April 4 – it snowed two inches.