As I was working on trimming the grass along our sidewalk this last weekend one or our neighbors came over and gave me a tip I thought I would pass along. I was using our tiller with a sod trimming blade on it to remove the extra growth of grass that insists on narrowing our sidewalk. Once you have trimmed the sod along the edge of the sidewalk you are left with that small strip of sod. In a perfect world that strip of sod pulls away without any extra work at all but since this has never really been a perfect world (at least from my experience) that little strip needs some extra persuasion. I started out using a shovel to do this work but then my neighbor suggested using a stirrup hoe, just run the edge of the hoe along the cut line and the base of the hoe along the sidewalk. This will put the strip of grass in the middle of the hoe. After doing the remaining 90% of the job in the time it took to do the first 10% I decided this was the way to go. For those of you who don’t know what a stirrup hoe is I have included a picture. Good Luck.

Thought I would share a co-workers picture with everyone. He lives in the Tri-Cities and as such things are a little ahead of the people in the Spokane area but this was such a great shot that I thought you would enjoy it.

Reading through a Northwest Nurseries publication I came across a link to a picture library that I thought I would pass on to our readers. This library has quite an extensive collection of pictures arranged by type of plant and scientific name as well as a search function. Just so I don’t get in trouble with Laurie I need to mention that this repository is NOT specific to our growing zone. Please pay special attention to the zone listing for each of the plants and for you own sake try not to fall into the mindset that “if I treat it really well it will grow for me”. One thing you find out very quickly in gardening is you can not make things grow regardless of how hard you try.

Anyway – the link as promised: Bailey Nurseries Image Library

Just to remind everyone as they are walking past the plants in the entryways of your favorite store – we are not yet out of the woods for the possibility of a good hard frost.  The average last frost date that I have found reviewing various websites can be as early as March 30th to as late as June 6th with the most common last frost date for this area being May 4th.  Just keep this in mind and try to resist the temptation as you walk past all of those beautiful plants. I am sure the retailers would love to sell you the same plant twice but most of us don’t want to have to go through the hassle of planting things twice let alone having to pay for them twice.