March ’26: It’s all happening!
Goodbye asphalt, hello leaflets — things are finally in motion.
Grass is greening, buds are swelling, but the most exciting thing to have burst forth in my garden this month was the asphalt! After my staring at it for three years and wishing it gone, it took a neighborhood landscaping team all of an hour and a half to bust it up and haul it away. There was a more robust layer of chunky parking-lot gravel beneath it than the previously-removed rectangle suggested. And honestly it’s so much better stripped down to just that, I’d have done this ages ago and lived with it this way for the interim, had I known. Alas, hindsight. But it’s gone, it’s finally gone! Courtyard garden coming soon.
I won’t know for sure until we probe the depth of it and start raking it away from the edges (where planting will happen), but I think there’s probably enough of the chunky stuff here to use as the underlayer for the pea gravel, which is a nice gift. It will still be a month or two before the grading and compacting and pea graveling can happen, but I’ve got lots to do in April, which I’ve dubbed Infrastructure Month. More on that below:
GARDEN NOTES
Our omnipresent layer of snow melted quickly on March 9th and 10th, and I’m now in the garden daily looking for signs of reemergence. Every woody tree and shrub is covered in swollen buds, but the first and only tiny leaflets so far are on one of the nannyberry Virburnums along the back fence, which I noted on 03.29.
Signs of life! Clockwise: burnet (is that you?), peony, nannyberry, aster.
All of the plants in nursery pots that I left out to overwinter behind the house appear to be in good shape! They were literally nestled under a mound of snow for nearly the entire winter — to their benefit, I think. The only one that’s keeping me on pins and needles is the potted redbud, which made me wait last year, so I’m not worried at the moment. Even the scraggly little evergreens I planted in October, with crossed fingers and prayers to the garden gods, seem to have come through the winter.
The only herbaceous plants showing growth at the base so far are the three peonies (03.30) and a smooth aster (mid-month) in the ground, and the American burnet in one of the nursery pots (also mid-month). The leaflets in the latter don’t really seem like they would evolve into burnet leaves, so either they’re unusual in that way or something else has made a home in there. We shall see.
And I did plant one thing in March: I cleared out the soft pot in the driveway potager where I had left the skeleton of a Sungold. (The other two tomato pots got seeded with field peas late last season.) Once cleared, I poked 6 fava seeds into the dirt, because why not try? And see what happens.
