Spring in New Hampshire arrives on its own schedule — and that schedule almost never matches the one Granite State gardeners keep in their heads. By the time the calendar says May, the maples are still sluggish at higher elevations, the soil is too cold to plant in much of the state, and the snow line has only just retreated from the White Mountains. But that does not mean there is nothing to do in the yard. NHPR’s Homegrown NH, the long-running gardening collaboration between New Hampshire Public Radio and the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center, has just dropped a new installment that lays out exactly the kind of work that pays off long before the first tomato seedling goes in the ground.
Host Emma Erler, lead horticulturist at Squam Lakes, walked listeners through her own spring punch list — the work she does at Kirkwood Gardens, the public garden she tends on the Science Center’s Holderness campus. The unglamorous truth she shared: the most important garden work in New Hampshire’s transitional season is not planting at all. It is cleanup, structure, and soil prep — the kind of effort that determines what happens in June and July far more than any seed packet bought in May.
Pruning Is the First Job, Not Planting
“Starting typically in March and going through mid-April or so, I’m doing a lot of pruning in Kirkwood Gardens,” Erler said in the Homegrown NH episode. The focus is on removing anything that died or was damaged over the winter — broken branches, frost-killed tips, anything that came through January and February in worse shape than it went in.
For Granite State gardeners, the timing window is narrow. Pruning too late, after a plant has fully leafed out, sends it scrambling to compensate for lost growth. Pruning too early, before the worst frost risk has passed, can expose fresh cuts to a deep cold snap. Late March through mid-April — Erler’s window — is the sweet spot for most ornamentals and many fruit trees, with the exact dates sliding north or south by a few weeks depending on whether you garden in Hanover or Hampton.
Brush Cleanup From the Big Trees
Anyone who lives near mature New Hampshire hardwoods knows the spring problem: a winter’s worth of broken sticks, dropped branches, and shed bark scattered across every square yard of lawn and bed. Erler’s gardens at Kirkwood are surrounded by big sugar maples, and she said the brush load is constant. “Those big sugar maples drop all sorts of sticks and branches each year,” she said. The work is unsexy but consequential. A lawn that goes into May with last year’s debris on it will green up unevenly and grow more slowly. Beds buried in fallen wood will stay cold longer and run a higher risk of fungal problems once humidity rises.
Rake the Lawn — Yes, Again
Granite State gardeners who raked aggressively last fall sometimes assume the work is done. Erler disagrees. “I typically will end up raking the lawn again in the spring,” she said. “There are invariably patches of matted oak leaves that are going to prevent the lawn from growing well, or they will just end up smothering the grass in areas where the ground is thawed out fully and it’s dry.”
Oak leaves are the particular culprit because they break down slowly and mat into a dense thatch that blocks sunlight from reaching new spring grass. A light spring rake, focused on the worst-matted areas rather than the whole yard, is enough to make a difference.
Pull Mulch and Leaves Away From Shrub Bases
Erler’s third tip is one many homeowners get wrong: pull leaves and other mulching material away from the bases of woody shrubs. “The bark on woody plants doesn’t like to have mulching material piled up against it, and that includes leaves,” she said. “So pulling those out, usually by hand or with a small little hand rake, is a nice thing to do in the spring.”
The mistake here is the so-called “mulch volcano” — the deep cone of mulch piled up the trunk of a tree or the base of a shrub that retailers and over-eager landscapers love but plant pathologists hate. Mulch piled against bark traps moisture, invites rot, encourages voles to chew under cover, and can kill an otherwise healthy plant over several seasons. Spring is the right moment to fix it.
Care for Spring Bulbs — and Defeat the Squirrels
For gardens with daffodils, tulips, grape hyacinths, or other spring bulbs, Erler recommends pulling away matted leaf cover so the new shoots can emerge cleanly. Then comes the best tip in the whole episode: an organic fertilizer-meets-squirrel-deterrent.
“Some of these materials are made out of blood meal or composted eggs, egg waste or compost,” Erler said of the organic fertilizers she uses. “Putting that over top of those bulbs not only helps the bulbs, but it keeps a lot of those squirrels off as well.” The smell — unpleasant to mammals, neutral to bulbs — discourages the digging that plagues many tulip beds. Synthetic fertilizers, by contrast, Erler waits to apply until plants are actively growing, “so that the fertilizer isn’t going to waste.”
Why This Matters for New Hampshire Yards
Spring garden cleanup is not glamorous, but it is the difference between a yard that hits June already healthy and one that spends the whole summer playing catchup. New Hampshire’s growing season is short — typically 120 to 150 days depending on elevation and proximity to the coast — and time lost to fixable problems in May is hard to recover. A clean lawn, properly pruned shrubs, mulch held back from bark, and well-tended bulbs are not optional finishing touches. They are the foundation of everything that grows after them.
For gardeners with their own questions, Homegrown NH takes them by email or voice memo at HomegrownNH@nhpr.org. The show airs as part of NHPR’s regular programming and is available on the Homegrown NH podcast feed.
Source: Homegrown NH: Spring into action with garden tasks you can do now — NHPR
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