With warmer weather coming our way, New Yorkers can start getting their lawns and gardens prepped for the season.
Although it’s still too early to plant flowers in the ground, putting down fertilizer in your grass after the harsh winter and getting your flower beds cleaned up is a great way to prep your lawn for the season.
“Right now, for lawn, would be to get your crabgrass preventer on and a fertilizer on your lawn. Also, if you need to do any seeding from the plow with all the snow we had, just be careful you don’t put crabgrass preventer where you’re putting grass seed,” said Jess Hafner, the co-owner of Chuck Hafner’s Garden Center.
He says it’s also good to fertilize your garden to give your trees and shrubs strength going into the season.
“If you have any ornamental grasses, it’s a good time to prune those back. If you have any broken branches from winter damage, you know, prune those out and even mulch if you want to mulch. Depending on how much you’re going to be planting, it’s a great time to get your beds cleaned up and mulched,” said Hafner.
“This is just their grass seed that you can buy in bulk by the scoop. I’ve had a lot of luck with this, particular grass seed in the past, so I thought we’d come up and get the same,” said Chris Kotchey.
He and his wife traveled from Binghamton to get their grass seeds because he says they don’t have a garden center this size where they live.
“When the spring comes, We have a lot of bare patches in the yard, so we’ll use this. I’ll use the grass seed to fill in the holes, and then I’ll get some of their topsoil to cover that up. You know, protect the seeds while it’s coming up,” said Kotchey.
This is also a good time to get perennial plants as they change throughout the season.
“The ones that we have now, we really won’t have in May because they’ll be done blooming. And when you do a garden, you want to have color all the way through the season. So you buy early-blooming, you buy mid-blooming, you buy late-blooming. So you kind of continue to pass the baton along when you’re doing a perennial garden,” said Hafner.