Video: Late Winter Gardening Projects

In this week’s video, you get to follow me along as I take care of some late-winter gardening projects. What’s the title of my video? It’s “A Day in the Life of Susan’s In The Garden” because that’s the best I could come up with! Much of it will be about pruning.

In it, you’ll hear what is a typical day for me. I even show you a quilt project I’m currently working on. Unfortunately, once spring gets here, I’ll have to set those aside for the most part.

Here are the winter gardening projects that I take care of in this video:

• Placing cloches on my future lettuce bed to pre-warm the soil
• I also announce the topic for next week’s video: raised bed gardening
• Pruning back some errant red-twig dogwood stems
• Trimming back the height of the arborvitae hedge at the edge of our vegetable garden
• Pruning part of our burning bush branches to give a shrub more room and light
• Replacing old capillary mats in our little greenhouse
• Deadheading last year’s hydrangea blossoms (learn which ones are safe to do now)
• And hanging a very special sign on the garden gate!

My husband Bill and I live in Spokane, Wash., which is about 300 miles east of Seattle. Our hardiness zone here ranges from 5b to 6a. That means the spring weather is taking its time getting here!

I wanted to add some cautionary advice here. If your ground is starting to get a bit “mucky,” be careful what you do. It’s too soon to be walking on your lawn as that will compress the roots. And the soil in your garden beds needs time to get back to normal again, too.

The gardening projects I chose for this video were all done either on frozen ground or outside of garden beds. Believe me, I know how anxious we all are about doing all sorts of things in our gardens!

As I mentioned in the list above, I deadheaded last year’s hydrangea blossoms. It’s so important that you know which type of wood (i.e., branches) the plant blooms on. If your hydrangea blooms on old wood (meaning, the previous year’s branches), don’t trim them off in the spring. Otherwise, you’re removing this year’s future blooms.

If you know the variety, do a web search to find out this important detail. My hydrangea varieties bloom on new wood, so I can prune to my heart’s content! Of course, I also try to prune for good reason.

Here’s my video on late winter gardening projects:

Did you enjoy this video? I have over gardening 600 videos on my YouTube channel. I also have a Pruning videos playlist so you can pick and choose videos on this topic.