Notes from Havenwood

April in the Garden: Edging, Weeding, Planting & Spring Glory

“…There is no time like Spring,
When life's alive in everything,
Before new nestlings sing,
Before cleft swallows speed their journey back
Along the trackless track, —
God guides their wing,
He spreads their table that they nothing lack,
Before the daisy grows a common flower,
Before the sun has power
To scorch the world up in his noontide hour…”

🌿 Christina Rossetti, Spring

Welcome to Notes on Havenwood…

where I share more of the inner workings of my one-acre town garden in western Pennsylvania. We are located in horticultural zone 5/6 between the Great Lakes and the Appalachian mountains.

April began cold, freezing all growth still while I was gone traveling in the UK, and then the heat made everything jump up these last two weeks til it now feels like we are a bit ahead of normal. It has been good to have the mad green rush of April all over again with its narcissus and tulips, magnolia and crabapple blossoms, fritillary, and primula.

Gone are the freezing nights and frosty mornings, at least for now. Cold temps will always be threatening in the background of all gardening activities until a month from now. One is never really safe from snowfall here until Memorial Day. And yet it seems worth it every year to push ahead and take a chance on sowing and planting more in April each year because our Mays often turn so dry. So mid-month the spinach and bok choy were direct sown in the Kitchen Garden, and this week the old and new dahlias with their shoots went into the raised beds.

If March was a zero-to-sixty-miles-an-hour kind of month, then April this year is full lift off.

Let’s take a look on what was going on around Havenwood this April…

Tulips are our first crop in the Kitchen Garden this year. The first photo was from April 25th, and the second April 29th.

Edging & Weeding