49March 25, 2015

How about a bit of a trip down memory lane. If I had told you in early January that you would still have feet of snow in your yard on March 25, you probably would have laughed so hard that tears would be streaming down your cheeks. Who’s crying now?

Of course my predictions abilities are not that good but let me take a few moments to predict what I think you will find once all of the snow melts.
I think that many of you will find that there is significant damage to your shrubs. Snow shoveled off the roof wound up landing on the shrubs and the shrubs will have broken branches and in some cases the shrubs will be smashed beyond repair. Minor branch breakage can be pruned out and the shrubs will put out new growth and will be fine by summer. However, I am willing to bet that there will be some horribly bad damage to many shrubs from snow load that did major damage.
Once the snow melts, I think that you will find that the moles and voles have had a field day tunneling through the soil under all of that snow. The tunneling of moles can lead to surface tunnels with lots of dead grass. Voles tunnel too but they also can wind up eating the roots of your perennials and even some of your shrubs.
Mice and rabbits will have tunneled under the snow and have done damage to the bark of your trees and shrubs. This one is not really a guess because I have already had reports from customers that this has happened to their plants. If you can get to the damage early and if the critters have not girdled the bark all around the stem, you may be able to save the plants.

If you didn’t do a final cutting of the lawn so that the grass was cut very short, you will probably see a lot of fungus damage to your lawn. Many of you will see a disease called snow mold. This disease will cause dead patches in your lawn. In some cases the lawn will grow back. In other cases the dead areas will need to be re-seeded. With grass that will stay wet after the snow melts, there will be a lot of fungus diseases showing up during the early part of the growing season. If you see problems on your lawn once the grass begins to grow, don’t wait for too long before you treat your lawn with a fungicide.

Plowing snow is always a thankless job. If you are pushing snow off of a driveway, there probably will be some areas where the grass is rolled back by the force of the plow pushing the snow back off the driveway. Once the snow melts, you can put down a bit of topsoil and then fold that grass back into place. In many cases, the grass will re-root and very soon will be growing as well as the rest of the lawn.

These are some of my predictions. I hope none of them are true in your yard. However, with the tough winter that we had, I have a feeling that some of them will be true in most yards.

Well, that’s all for this week. I’ll talk to you again next week.