As soon as the snow goes, as it has in many areas and is about to in the rest, it is good practice to pull back the mulch. One of the purposes of winter mulch is to keep soil cold by insulating the ground, but now is time to get soils warmed up. This is one time of the year when you want to expose some soil, but save the mulch you pull. Be ready to put the same mulch back in a week or two once the soil does warm up.
Some care has to be taken when removing winter mulch. It is wet and soggy but may contain the tips of emerging perennials, so don't just go in there and rake away. Also, be careful of labels hidden in the mulch. This can be dusty, hands-and-knees-on-the-ground work, so you may want to wear a painter's mask.
Lawns are the big question on most homeowner's minds, though. Why is everyone in such a rush to get out there and work on the very same lawn they were tired of mowing last September? I submit that there is not that much to do to your lawn this time of year.
First, as noted last week, it has to dry out. Once it does -- and I mean dry so that you can walk in your socks on it without getting wet feet -- then you can mow over the winter debris. No bagging. Just chop up anything that your blades can safely reduce and leave it be where it falls. This is great food for the microbes that will feed your lawn this summer. Why buy fertilizers when you don't have to?
But if your spouse makes you bag up all the goodies on your lawn, at least use the stuff under and around trees and shrubs. It's the perfect mulch for them but also makes great brown material for a compost pile. It's not bad mulch for perennials, either.
That's all there is to do. Don't apply fertilizer and don't waste time raking thatch. All the tops of the lawn plants are dead, and a thatching rack will look full after one pass this time of year, though it's probably not full of thatch. You can't really tell if you have a thatch problem until the grass greens up.
How do you get the lawn to green without fertilizer? First, don't expect much until the buds are swollen and green on the birch trees. At this point the microbes are feeding the plant, and the temperature is warm enough to produce chlorophyll. Give your lawn water and it will green up. Why put down fertilizers, organic or not, until you know you need them?
The only exception to doing anything else would be spreading a bit of compost around the lawn to beef up the microbe herd while also adding some good organic matter. Remember, most of our lawns are planted in lousy soil left by the contractor who built the foundation. Apply up to an inch layer of compost by dumping piles around the lawn and then raking the piles down and into the soil.
There is another practice that has caught on in the Lower 48: over-seeding the lawn. Since the lawn is constantly mowed and does not go to seed as it would in nature, the practice suggests throwing seed on an existing lawn in spring. Application recommendations range from one to two pounds of seed per 1,000 square feet for a really well-established lawn to three or four pounds for a weedy, scratchy looking one.
The results of over-seeding are reported to be thicker, greener and healthier lawns, as new plants supplement the old growth and weeds are crowded out. If you add compost beforehand, the results are even better. The spring application of seed makes sense here. And to make the point again, we should all only be watering our lawns, which will also help the seed germinate.
Jeff Lowenfels is America's longest-running garden columnist and author of "Teaming With Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web." He can be reached at jeff@gardener.com.
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