JANUARY SERVICE HIGHLIGHT: PRE-PLANNING FOR 2010!

By Frank Stewart, Landscape Manager

It is currently eleven degrees outside and I have just trudged through the 4+” of freshly fallen snow and cleared my way into the cold frame houses to confirm the sizes, varieties and prices of various fruit trees that we currently have available. This particular trek was in response to a customer request. I received her phone call yesterday during the worst of the current snow storm. Her brother had expressed an interest in starting a home orchard utilizing organic methods, and she and her husband wanted to help plan and purchase the trees as a gift to the brother. Her first question was “When is the best time to plant an orchard?” I responded with “25 years ago. But the second best time is today.” She said there was no way she was going out to chip through the frozen soil surface to plant trees today. My suggestion was let’s start planning right now, selecting the site, determining a planting pattern and varieties to be used, and estimating costs. When the weather breaks (and it will, won’t it?) she will be prepared to take advantage of it. This conversation inspired me to write this month’s article, where we had planned to discuss the benefits of early planning of spring projects.

Our intention for this part of the newsletter is to highlight one of our services each month. This month’s topic is landscape design, but specifically pre-planning for activities that will occur later in the year. The nursery and landscape fields have something of a “feast or famine” structure. Our landscape design professionals will have plenty of time in January, February and early March to be available for consultation and design. When the sun becomes nice and warm and the grass starts turning green everyone gets the fever and schedules quickly fill up. In a perfect world, we would do all of our designing and planning during the off-season and have everything lined up and ready to go as the conditions allow. The obvious advantage to the professional is it spreads our workload out over a longer period of time. I don’t know if many consumers realize the true advantage that it is to them. Although we endeavor to give our best effort all of the time, you are likely to receive more concentrated attention at this time of year than after the spring rush has broken. Generally, there are off-season discounts that can be taken advantage of, and you will already be in line and on the schedule before the person who did not pre-plan has even made a phone call. I think the hardest part is getting over the mental blocks that keep some of us from thinking about our spring gardens right now. By the time the golden flowers of Cornus Mas begin to stir your gardening urges a good opportunity to get your spring landscaping planned has passed.  With single-digit temperatures and wind chills our thoughts are of the sugar bowl instead of planting Sugar Maples, the fringe of ice on our eaves instead of Fringe trees, turkey and cranberry sauce rather than Cranberry bush Viburnums, cups of hot cocoa rather than Cup Plants and winter weather advisories instead of Creeping Wintergreen (I’ve got a million of `em). However, my advice is to make an effort to get past this block and get into a gardening state-of-mind.

Here are some suggestions:
• Take a stroll through a local park or preferably an arboretum and notice the design aspects of their planting beds. Look for plant species that you are not familiar with and learn more about them.

• Enjoy the winter interest of Hawthorn, Witch Hazel, Winter-Berry Holly, Red-Twig Dogwood and others. Until you’ve observed Corylus `Contorta’ against a bank of snow you have not seen the best feature of this plant.

• Visit a local home and garden show.

• Read up on different options such as landscaping with natives and rain gardens.

• Attending one of Marvin’s gardening seminars is a sure-fire way to get you in the mood.