56February 2, 2011
We have had plenty of snow. Luckily, most of it has been light in weight. However, the sheer volume of snow may have led to broken branches on your trees and shrubs. If you can get to the plants, it would be a good idea to trim off those broken branches. Allowing the branches to remain on the plant can lead to more damage as any additional weight of snow can lead to more damage as branches are pulled further away from the side of the plant. As I said, you may have a lot of snow in your yard. This can make it harder to get to the plants and do the pruning. Yet, you must do the pruning as soon as possible to prevent any more damage to the plant.
Snow can present additional problems to your plants. A snowblower or a plow can throw a tremendous amount of snow onto your plants. This weight of snow can crush your plants. I did do snow plowing for many years and I do use a snowblower so I know the amount of damage they can do to your plants. All of that being said, many of you have hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of plants that can be damaged by snow being dumped onto the plants. As much as snow removal can be a major pain, think about the plants that can be damaged if you are careless in snow removal.
Ice can also be a problem for plants. We haven’t necessarily had a major ice storm in our area. If you look at your roof, you will probably see icicles that are growing each day. If any of those large icicles lands on a shrub, it is going to do major damage to the shrub. It may not be possible to knock those icicles off when they are small. However, the larger they get, the more danger they pose to humans and plants. There probably isn’t a good solution to this problem if you can’t get the icicles off the roof. Just one more thing to worry about during this miserable winter!
On the bright side, the 2011 seed packets are now in almost all of the stores. We have expanded on the varieties of vegetable seeds that we will have for sale. If seed packets are out, spring can’t really be too far away.
Well, that’s all for this week. I’ll talk to you again next week.