Landscaping Questions

The next time you fertilize, close the spreader door to only allow half as much fertilizer to fall out. Then go over the lawn once.Maria Sbytova/Shutterstock

If you haven’t bought an Easter lily, you should go buy one now. They will be on sale after this weekend, and if you want to you can call it a spring lily. You can enjoy the flowers and fragrance for the next few weeks and then you can plant it outdoors.

Keep the lilies in bright, indirect light until the outdoor nighttime temperatures stay above the 40s. Plant them in a partially sunny site with well-drained soil about 6 inches deep and add a few inches of mulch. Next year, they will bloom in midsummer. They make a nice display when planted in masses, so buy all the ones they have left, even if they are no longer in bloom, and plant them outdoors.

If you are in zones eight through 10, they can be planted outside for the summer. In the fall, dig them up and plant them in potting soil in a pot an inch wider than the bulb. Refrigerate the whole pot for eight to 12 weeks, keeping the soil damp. Take them out and leave them in the pot or replant them in the ground.

Question: How do I go about pruning evergreens? I saw a description of this recently... something about pruning the candles?

Answer: The new growth on pine trees does look like a candelabra and the individual new branches are the candles. To shorten the growth of pine tree branches, the candle can be pruned. Cut off more of the candle to reduce the new growth; only cut off a little to encourage branching on longer stems. During this candle growth period, new buds will form along the sides of the candle for the next year’s new side branches. After the candle is fully grown, it pretty much loses the ability to form these new buds. So, cutting off a pine tree branch at any other time of year may create a dead stub of a branch, without the possibility of new growth.

Most other varieties of evergreens keep their ability to grow new side buds as long as there are still green live needles on the branch where the cut is made. If the pruning cut is made so far back that there are no live leaves, the chance of that branch growing new side buds is not very good.

Question: When I used my drop spreader to fertilize my lawn, it made stripes of fertilized and unfertilized grass. I do not want to buy another spreader, so how do I use this one properly and how do I correct the stripes I have now?

Answer: You will have to live with the stripes for a while, but you could try a very small dose of fertilizer on the unfertilized stripes. However, do not use too much because what overlaps on to the fertilized parts will be giving those areas too much fertilizer.

Try testing your spreader to see if it is dropping fertilizer over the whole width of the spreader and that none of it is clogged. Use sand on the driveway to see where the fertilizer actually drops to get the proper overlap. The spreader may not be dropping any fertilizer next to the wheels, so you may have to overlap a little more than you thought. Next time you fertilize with the drop spreader, watch the wheel marks in the grass very carefully.

The next time you fertilize, close the spreader door to only allow half as much fertilizer to fall out. Then go over the lawn once. Then go over it again, but this time overlap the first set of wheel marks halfway. This will give the whole lawn a full dose of fertilizer and any gaps will at least get some fertilizer. There will be less of a difference between the full and half doses so any stripes will be less noticeable. On the second pass, do not go at right angles to the first path because that will create a checkerboard pattern of fully fertilized areas and not-fertilized areas.

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