Laurie Mustard / Winnipeg Free Press
The beautiful Holmstrup Cedar will keep your yard green all year round.
One of the reasons spring is one of my favourite seasons is because I’m tuning up my lawnmower ... not my snowblower.
es, it’s that time of year when over a few short weeks we go from white to brown to green — a gorgeous green that sometimes hangs with us over a seven month span if we’re lucky. Let’s hope we’re about to get lucky. Like so many of you, WOW, do I love summer.
In fact I’ve decided to plant more evergreen type trees and bushes around my yard to help make winter look more like summer. To accomplish that, earlier this week I visited my good friend The Guru of Green, none other than Ray DuBois, president and owner of Ron Paul Garden Centre at 2641 St. Mary’s Rd.
Having been deemed an essential service, and following all Coronavirus protocols to the letter, they are open, and ready to shift your focus from virus to iris, if you catch my drift.
The iris, in case you’ve forgotten, is a genus of 260 to 300 species of flowering plants with showy flowers.
No surprise when DuBois had some excellent suggestions for greening up my winter view, all of which I’m pondering.
They include, the Holmstrup Cedar which grows to about nine feet high and four feet across, sure wouldn’t mind having a row of those along the property line.
Then there’s DeGroot’s Spire Cedar, also grows to about nine feet high with a three foot spread, excellent for creating a hedge, or used in groupings for windscreens.
Another is the Blue Arrow Juniper, 12 feet high, four foot spread — and finally a very popular one, the Brandon Cedar, height 20 feet, eight foot spread, and described on the Ron Paul website at ronpaulgardencentre.com as a characteristically narrow and spire-like evergreen for home landscape use, dense foliage remains bright year round, hardy and adaptable (and my favourite part), the scale-like leaves remain green throughout the winter.
They all sound great, and there are numerous others of course.
It’s homework time. And once the ground finishes thawing (or "unthawing" as some people say — which would mean freezing if it was a real word), is the perfect time to plant them.
With true spring weather having just arrived this week, unless you’ve done it already, now is an excellent time to do any pruning you need done, branches removed, before the sap really starts flowing and all that new growth comes out.
Now, it would be remiss of me not to mention that if you are planning to have some shrubs, bushes, trees added to your yard this spring, study up on what care has to be given them to allow the highest possibility of survival.
I have a pretty green thumb, but failed miserably at nurturing the eight cranberry bushes I planted a couple of years ago, which are now all dead.
Assuming it was my ignorance and negligence that killed them, I asked DuBois what likely went wrong.
He mentioned a couple of reasons including the need to dig the hole the same depth as the root but twice as wide to give the roots room to grow (I didn’t do that) and to water them at least once a day when first planted, then every second day and so on, while consistently monitoring the state of their health. I can see now that I definitely did not water them enough.
DuBois says about 95 per cent of newly installed plants, bushes and trees that die relatively soon after they are planted is usually due to lack of water. Lesson learned.
But for today, a pruning I shall go. Who ever thought there’d come a time when pruning would sound exciting.
Have a wonderful, healthy, weekend!
Comments and feedback are always welcome.
lmustard1948@gmail.com
