March

•    Edge beds as soon as the ground thaws and the snow melts.
•    Pull winter weeds, but don’t mulch yet. Wait a few more weeks until the soil dries and warms a bit.
•    Hold off digging or tilling if the soil is wet. You’ll force out crucial air spaces and destroy soil structure. Damp is OK. Wet or soggy is not.
•    Before new growth starts, prune summer-blooming flowering shrubs such as abelia, butterfly bush, beautyberry, caryopteris, clethra (summersweet), smooth hydrangea, tree-type hydrangea, rose-of-sharon, St. Johnswort, crape myrtle, summer-blooming spirea and vitex. Also prune grape vines and raspberries.
•    Inspect the trees and shrubs for winter damage. Prune off any broken or storm-damaged branches.
•    Tamp perennials and young shrubs back into ground that were forced partly out of the soil by freezing and thawing.
•    On above-40-degree day, spray dormant oil to smother eggs of overwintering pests such as scale on pine and euonymus, spruce gall adelgids on spruce and Douglas fir, and woolly adelgids on hemlocks.
•    Finish pruning fruit trees and spray with dormant oil if you didn’t do it in February. Use lime sulfur or fungicide to prevent leaf curl on peaches.
•    Toward the end of the month, cut back ornamental grasses and liriope to a stub. Cut back perennials that have browned but weren’t trimmed in fall. Most perennials can be divided late this month through April, too.
•    Make size-control and shaping cuts to evergreens such as arborvitae, boxwood, holly, yew, falsecypress and hemlock.
•    Plant bare-root trees and shrubs late March through early April, assuming soil isn’t soggy.
•    When ground thaws, use granular fertilizer on trees, shrubs and perennial beds.
•    After mid-month, direct-seed peas, spinach, onion sets, lettuce, chard, mesclun, turnips and radishes. Plant onion plants, potatoes, cabbage, leeks, chard, kale, collards, asparagus, horseradish, rhubarb, chives, Brussels sprouts and parsley toward the end of the month after gradually hardening off indoor-grown transplants.
•    Rake any matted leaves and other debris off the lawn when snow melts.
•    Lightly scatter wood ashes from the fireplace over the lawn, unless the soil is already alkaline (over 7.0 on the pH scale). Small amounts of wood ash also are fine added to the compost pile.
•    Start seeds inside of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and most annual flowers.
•    Put crabgrass preventer on the lawn late in month when forsythia blooms. If you use Preen, corn gluten meal or similar weed preventers in shrub and perennial beds, forsythia-bloom is also a good cue of when to apply them.
•    Late in the month, begin seeding thin or dead patches in the lawn. (Do NOT use crabgrass preventer if seeding new grass.)
•    Remove winter protection from roses late in the month. Prune and spray canes with dormant oil before new growth begins.
•    Pot and begin watering cannas, dahlias, caladium and other tender bulbs so they’ll be ready to go outside in May. Toss any that rotted.
•    Repot pot-bound houseplants.