11-04-2025
Garden Gossip: April gardening is half inside, half outside
At the Seed Library event at Laramie County Library in mid-March, there were 600 excited gardeners picking from 150 kinds of seeds. If you missed it, there are more free seeds catalogued on the third floor of the main library and at the branches in Pine Bluffs and Burns, said Kellie Johnson, library staff member.
As the gardeners trailed by, Laramie County Master Gardeners showed ways to extend the growing season, how to fold seed-starting pots from newspaper and how to slip a dried bean and a wet cotton ball in a tiny plastic bag with a stretchy band so you can wear it and watch the bean sprout hour by hour. I don't think any kids turned down the offer.
The people I chatted with included a seasoned gardener, relocating from Texas, who will be attempting to grow vegetables in Wyoming for the first time. Another man confessed he'd never grown anything before and came to see what it was all about. Someone else showed me a photo of the piece of prairie they wanted to make into a garden.
One woman told me she has a large vegetable garden already. Another woman confessed to being a novice and came with a friend for support. Someone else confessed to being a Master Gardener intern this spring. The rigorous classes finish up in March in time for interns to put all that new knowledge to work.
Gardening in April in Cheyenne is part indoors and part outdoors. Indoors, my forced spring bulbs are finished. The crocuses, daffodils and some tulips did well, but other tulips did not. I'm letting the foliage die back, and sometime this spring I will find places to plant them outside so they have a chance to build up their bulbs to bloom next spring.
In April, outside, I need to lift a little of the leaf mulch where I know I have other spring bulbs sending up shoots. I don't want to remove all the mulch — it offers protection when it snows in May.
In the house, most of my amaryllis bulbs are blooming. I don't force them to bloom for Christmas, but give them water and sunlight year-round. I've been documenting when they flower for the last eight years (some bulbs are even older), and 85% of the time it's mid-March to mid-April.
April is when most of my orchids want to bloom, too. This year, for the first time, two phalaenopsis orchids decided, instead of one, to put up two and even three flower spikes each — and the spikes have branches full of buds!
My accidental wave petunia experiment is going well. Last fall, before frost, I cut off all the stems with flowers still blooming and put them in a vase. They continued to grow buds and then roots, so I potted them up. The original plant, cut back to nubs, started putting out new growth where I left it in the garage, so I brought it in, too, and gave it lots of light and fertilizer, and it is now blooming like crazy.
Mark is about ready to start his tomatoes: heat mats, shop lights and plastic dome to keep the humidity in until they sprout.
Outside, I'm still putting off cutting back most of the perennial flowers. Some flowerheads still have seeds or the birds can use them for perches. I cut fallen stems into 6-inch pieces and add them to the thinning layer of leaf mulch.
The two big trees in my garden leave a thick layer every fall, and by spring, I start peeling it back and adding it to the compost pile bucket by bucket. There's also wood mulch that's blown in from the neighbor up the street that I need to sweep up.
Little by little, on into May, I cut back the old perennial stems. But I've heard we should also leave some, especially the hollow ones that stay upright, for beneficial insects to lay eggs in, leaving them 12 inches high or so.
If the soil dries out enough, I could get a start on digging out more lawn so I have room to plant more perennials. Mark does a lot of digging in his raised vegetable bed in the backyard because every year the trees fill it with roots. But if there weren't tree roots, he could go for the no-till, no-dig option for the raised bed, letting the soil build structure and just adding a few inches of compost.
And then comes May, when we shuffle pots of vegetable starts in and out before we are sure the frosty nights are over and they can safely be planted outside.
