Monthly Gardener Calendar
Suggestions and ideas to help you enjoy gardening! 🌹
March
Planting
Planting
- Set out most shrubs and trees.
- Cold-weather annuals: sweet William, English daisies, pansies, and calendulas.
- Divide mondo grass, liriope, cannas, chrysanthemums, coreopsis, and phlox.
- Start seeds for tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, and eggplant.
- Set out herbs such as thyme, lemon balm, oregano, chives, sage, and winter savory.
- Sow seeds of Johnny jump-ups, sweet peas, larkspur, and forget-me-nots.
- Shrubs may be moved at this time. It is best to take a large rootball to save the current root system.
- Fertilize all ornamental shrubs and trees according to soil test results, or use a slow-release fertilizer.
- Top-dress azaleas and camellias with acid-loving fertilizer.
- Apply lime to peonies, clematis, and boxwoods.
- Spray new rose leaves for black spot disease weekly once leaves are fully emerged.
- A soil-drench rose disease control product can be used after leaves are fully developed.
- Prune roses. Remove dead and weak canes. Properly dispose of clippings.
- Prune crape myrtles and altheas for size and shape.
- Cut English ivy back very hard. It will come back very nicely in the spring.
- Trim mondo grass and liriope to 4–6 inches tall. Dispose of trimmings.
- Dispose of fallen camellia blossoms to prevent blight.
- Pinch off dead flowers from tulips/daffodils. Wait until May to cut foliage, after it turns yellow and dies.
- Apply pre-emerge to turf to prevent crabgrass and other summer weeds (late February in South Mississippi).
- Mulch all landscape bed areas—3 inches in new beds and only 1 inch in existing beds.
- Divide or repot overgrown houseplants. Cut back weak parts to encourage new growth. Apply liquid fertilizer every 2 weeks or as labeled.
- Okamee cherries, plums, pears, apples, Chinese snowballs, showy jasmines, redbuds, dogwoods, cherry laurels, maples, Japanese hollies, azaleas, sweet olives, weigelas, wisterias, flowering almonds, Lady Banks roses, buckeyes, knockout roses, mock oranges, fothergillas, royal paulownias.
- Bluebells, daffodils, hyacinths, early irises, pansies, violets.
- Maples, leatherleaf mahonias, yaupon hollies, Chinese hollies, cotoneasters, nandinas, (high-bush blueberries in South Mississippi).
