March Garden To-Do List in South Louisiana

Vegetables – Prep your garden for spring/summer vegetable transplants

• • Mitigate pests
    • Ants are the main pest I fight in the garden. Anyone else?? They drive me crazy. To get rid of ant colonies, get a mason jar, mix 1 part sugar to 4 parts borax, and add a tiny bit a water creating a paste. Poke holes in the lid of the mason jar, and lay it near the ant piles. The ants will eat your borax paste and bring it back to their colony, killing the colony. Borax is organic and ok to use in the garden. You could pour the paste directly on the ant piles as another option, but I have a dog who loves to eat everything so this is why I use a mason jar with holes in the lid.
    • Preventing future pests is also important going into this garden season. Spray the perimeter of your garden area with Captain Jack’s Dead Bug spray weekly to prevent pests from crawling into your beds.
  • Hand pull weeds
  • Add nutrients to your soil
    • I am adding Black Kow Compost, Alfalfa meal, and some organic garden soil to fill the beds up. Once I add the soil amendments I mix it in a little with my hands but I do not till. I try to not disturb the soil as much as possible.
  • Structures in Place
    • Add your garden stakes now so when you are ready to plant in a few weeks, your structures are already in place and the roots can grow around them.

Flowers/Annuals/Perennials: Annual Fertilizer Application

• • • Now is the time to fertilize your annuals, perennials, and shrubs. Going into spring when your plants are putting out new growth is the best time to give them a boost of fertilizer. I use Espoma’s Garden Tone, Rose Tone, and Berry Tone. (Rose tone is for roses and berry tone is for my blueberry bushes; Garden Tone is used for everything else). Follow the instructions on the back of package for how much fertilizer to add.

Plant Spring Bedding Annuals

Grass: Weed and Feed

• • • Either hand pull weeds or spread weed and feed on your grass. Our backyard is old pasture land and we fight weeds every single year. We used High Yield Weed & Feed this year.

Clean and Refill Bird / Hummingbird Feeders and Bird Baths

Citrus Trees Planting Time

• • • If you are planting citrus trees in the ground this year, now is the time to do it in Early Spring. I plan on posting more details about this in a future blog post once I plant mine in the ground. In the meantime, if you are shopping for citrus, Owari Satsuma and Improved Meyer Lemon are the varieties I’m starting with. I hear lemon trees are most susceptible to frost damage and Satsuma / Kumquat are the least.