March 2009 Frugal Gardener

Hi Everyone!

Welcome back to the garden and the month we've all been waiting for: March is the start of the promised land. Yes, the time when the urge to be outside in thegarden coupled with increasingly warmer weather is sometimes overpowering.

I want to welcome all of our new subscribers -- there's a ton of you this month -- and hope that you will enjoy our garden community. If you ever have any questions or suggestions please feel free to send an e-mail.

There are going to be a couple new things added in the upcoming months. I'm going to start a blog which will act as a garden journal. I'm hoping that you will add your insights and garden experiences as well. Also, I'm starting a new department in The Frugal Gardener called Cook's Corner. Gardening and cooking are so intertwined that I wanted to include cooking and kitchen tips in this newsletter.

There are lots of things to do in the garden, especially if you live in the part of the country that has cold winters but begins to see new growth in March in early April. So let's get to it.

It's time to get out into the garden and take a look at your flower and vegetable beds. There are some weeds that could have continued to grow throughout the winter and you may want to take a hand trowl and start digging them out. You can get a jump on Spring weeding by spending an hour in the garden in the wintertime cleaning things out.

While it is not yet time to prune tree branches, this is a great time to figure out which branches need to be cut back and which trees need to be taken out. For those of us living in climates where deciduous trees lose all of their leaves, late winter is a great time to be able to see what branches might be damaged, which may be crossing over another branch and what trees may be too dense. You can use surveyor's ribbon to determine what branches need to be cut as well as which trees need to be taken out.

As we get closer to Spring, there's a great temptation to start warm weather vegetable seeds. Try to resist the pull of summer. You'll want to start plants like tomatoes, peppers, and squashes no earlier than eight weeks before planting in the ground. I've always had a rule that I won't plant hot weather vegetables in the garden until at least Memorial Day in my zone 7 Virginia Garden. There are lots of gardeners out there that disagree with that (especially those who are competing for largest tomato by the Fourth of July) but in my garden we still have cold snaps in the end of May and beginning of June. This weather can affect the growth of warm weather vegetables.

Think about adding texture to your garden this year. Plants like hosta, coreopsis and lamb's ear add great variety to the garden. While you're at it, take a look at adding plants just for their foliage. I love elephant's ear, caladium and coleus for the variety of colors. If you find that your shade garden is a sea of green, add some bright red coleus and deep burgundy caladium

Make sure your tools are sharpened and clean and ready to go when the starter's gun for garden season goes off. Replace tools that are rusty or dull. Having ergonomic tools that minimize the strain on your back, hands and wrists will make gardening much more enjoyable.

Last summer I cut back my red pepper plant thinking that it was done for the season. I didn't want a pull it out of the GardenRack because other plants were growing around it and that would have disturbed their roots.

What happened next surprised me. The red pepper plant started to sprout new branches and by the time fall came around it was a plant that was starting to put out blooms again.

Rather than throwing it in the compost heap, I decided to dig it up, pot it and bring it inside to see if it would overwinter. This is an experiment that I had never done before so I wasn't confident that a vegetable plant would overwinter well without being in a greenhouse.

If you look at the picture to the right, you'll see that the plant has done very well. I sat it on my four season porch that stays around 68 degrees all year long. Now, with some watering and increasing sunlight, it should be ready to go back into the GardenRack to see if it will produce red peppers.

I'll keep you up-to-date on how this works and whether or not I will continue to try to overwinter vegetable plants. This red pepper plant seems to have done pretty well.

Last month we talked about buying plants and seeds online and one of our subscribers, Robin G. from Florida, had a great suggestion. It's called Revolution Money. Here's what Robin had to say:

"The new Money Exchange system from Revolution Money is great for ordering stuff online. You can transfer money to the money exchange account. Use it to pay someone or get money from someone. Use it to shop online. It holds only the money you put in there so you don't have to use your bank or credit card online. You can easily transfer money to and from people too."

Thanks for the great info, Robin!