April puts spotlight on America's growing pastime
Gardeners love to find new plants. Sacramento perennials expert Daisy Mah, in hat, talks to shoppers at the Perennial Plant Club's plant sale Friday morning in South Natomas. The sale continues Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., 1911 Bannon Creek Drive. Kathy Morrison
Happy National Gardening Day! If you want to celebrate, just go outside.
Never heard of this proclaimed commemoration of our favorite pastime? As special days go, it’s not that old – the Registrar of the National Day Calendar recognized it in 2018. But with renewed interest in gardening, it’s all over social media on Friday with lots of suggestions on what to do.
“U.S. National Gardening Day on April 14 is a day of encouragement, a day created to give gardeners a shove and a shovel so that they can begin their gardening journey,” say its creators.
At its roots, National Gardening Day was invented to sell books. Cool Springs Press, a major publisher of gardening books, gets credit for the idea. Its online catalog lists more than 500 gardening and home improvement titles including the ever-popular “Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew.
Gardening is America's No. 1 hobby with more than 55% of all households considered "active gardeners." And that group is growing; in a recent survey, two out of three American households plan to grow food plants this year.
April 14 falls near the middle of National Gardening Month, which traces back to 1986. Then-President Ronald Reagan declared the second week of April as National Gardening Week after lobbying by the National Garden Bureau, which had banded together about two dozen horticultural groups to support the measure.
“All gardeners know the innumerable benefits that gardening brings to people and their communities, and this is a month where we can spread that message to those who aren’t directly involved,” Reagan said in the original proclamation. “All around the country, educational activities, public events, government proclamations, local plant sales and swaps, and garden center seminars, are all occurring this month, building excitement and increasing participation in gardening.”
Started in 1920, the National Garden Bureau is a non-profit organization best known for championing Victory Gardens during World War II. It’s evolved into the nursery industry’s main marketing arm, connecting horticultural experts with gardeners nationwide.
In 2002, National Gardening Week stretched into National Gardening Month, which was pushed by the National Gardening Association.
Now, the National Gardening Association declares every April as its month. The association boasts more than 1 million online members and an in-depth website, https://garden.org/. Its plant database for example includes more than 750,000 plant photos.
National Gardening Month is a natural. For nurseries, April is like Christmas – their busiest time of the year. Garden clubs nationwide use April for new member recruitment and spring activities. And everybody is celebrating National Gardening Day.
So, how should you commemorate this day dedicated to getting hands dirty? Here’s the advice from the National Gardening Day organizers:
“As many gardeners know, the benefits of gardening come from more than the produce. Spending time in the garden also provides physical activity and an opportunity to join with nature. The day is a call to action to get out and grow flower or vegetable gardens. No matter how you garden, plant in the ground, in containers, in straw bales or in a square foot gardening box. Just garden!”
Adds the National Garden Bureau, “Above all, have fun! When you garden, you grow!”
For more inspiration from the National Garden Bureau: https://ngb.org/.
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Garden Checklist for week of Jan. 19
Dress warmly in layers – and get to work:
* Apply horticultural oil to fruit trees to control scale, mites and aphids. Oils need 24 hours of dry weather after application to be effective.
* This is also the time to spray a copper-based oil to peach and nectarine trees to fight leaf curl. The safest effective fungicides available for backyard trees are copper soap -- aka copper octanoate -- or copper ammonium, a fixed copper fungicide. Apply either of these copper products with 1% horticultural oil to increase effectiveness.
* Prune, prune, prune. Now is the time to cut back most deciduous trees and shrubs. The exceptions are spring-flowering shrubs such as lilacs.
* Now is the time to prune fruit trees. Clean up leaves and debris around the trees to prevent the spread of disease. (The exceptions are apricot and cherry trees, which are susceptible to a fungus that causes dieback if pruned now. Save those until summer.)
* Prune roses, even if they’re still trying to bloom. Strip off any remaining leaves, so the bush will be able to put out new growth in early spring.
* Clean up leaves and debris around your newly pruned roses and shrubs. Put down fresh mulch or bark to keep roots cozy.
* When forced bulbs sprout, move them to a cool, bright window. Give them a quarter turn each day so the stems will grow straight.
* Browse through seed catalogs and start making plans for spring and summer.
* Divide daylilies, Shasta daisies and other perennials.
* Cut back and divide chrysanthemums.
* Plant bare-root roses, trees and shrubs.
* Transplant pansies, violas, calendulas, English daisies, snapdragons and fairy primroses.
* In the vegetable garden, plant fava beans, head lettuce, mustard, onion sets, radicchio and radishes.
* Plant bare-root asparagus and root divisions of rhubarb.
* In the bulb department, plant callas, anemones, ranunculus and gladioli for bloom from late spring into summer.
* Plant blooming azaleas, camellias and rhododendrons. If you’re shopping for these beautiful landscape plants, you can now find them in full flower at local nurseries.
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