9 tasks for your March home-maintenance checklist

By Jeanne Huber The Washington Post

THE CALENDAR SAYS spring begins March 20. But you don’t need to wait to get started on early spring home-maintenance tasks. Especially if your home includes a garden, this is a super busy time of year, so go ahead and take advantage of the warming days and longer daylight hours. Here are nine chores that should be on your to-do list this month.

1. Cut back spent perennials

Good for you if you didn’t cut back asters, coreopsis, echinacea, rudbeckia or other perennials in the fall, and left the seed heads for birds to enjoy over the winter. But now it’s time. Sometimes you can just tug on a spent stem and it will cleanly break off at the soil line. But if doing that also brings up roots, clip the spent stems close to the ground while avoiding damage to new shoots. If perennials have grown into a clump that’s bigger than you want, then dig them up. Replant some of the most vigorous specimens. Compost or give away the others, or use them to populate a different part of your garden.

2. Look underfoot

Check outdoor steps, walkways and decks to make sure they are stable and don’t have slippery spots. If treads are coated with algae or moss, kill the growth with a bleach solution or a product labeled for that purpose. Scrub off the growth by hand or with a power washer adjusted to a setting appropriate to the material. The pressure can be higher if you’re cleaning stone or concrete than if you’re dealing with wood. If your house has wooden steps and boards are loose, inspect them to make sure the wood isn’t rotten. Replace any pieces that are, and screw the others back into place. And fix or replace any wobbly handrails.

3. Delve into the freezer

March 6 is National Frozen Food Day, first proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. Yes, it’s silly. But it’s a good reminder to dig deep and rediscover what you’ve stored in the freezer.

Although food that stays frozen doesn’t become unsafe to eat over time, it can become unappetizing, especially in the freezer compartment of a frost-free refrigerator, where temperatures cycle up and down to prevent ice from forming. So cull what you’re unlikely to eat. If you have a chest freezer, you will prob - ably also need to remove ice buildup. Unplug the freezer, take out everything and use a hair dryer to coax the ice to melt faster.

When you restock, sort the food by categories that work for your household: meat, veggies, desserts, leftovers. It’s tempting to organize with separate crates for different kinds of food, but freezing makes many plastics brittle. Fabric shopping bags are a good alternative.

4. Tune up your air conditioner

While the weather’s still cool, schedule a tuneup for your air conditioner. Maintenance should include checking the components, lubricating fans and motors, tightening or changing belts, testing the capacitors and crankcase heater, and calibrating the thermostat. There are also a few things you can do yourself: Clear leaves, grass clippings, pollen and other debris from the screen of the condensing unit; clean out the condensate hose, so it doesn’t become blocked with algae; and keep an eye out for drip marks on the compressor and tube, because these could indicate a leak.

5. Freshen up the entryway

If the entryway to your home screams winter — a plastic tray out for dripping boots, a closet clogged with coats — try giving it a facelift. Store the gear you won’t need during warmer weather. Replace the doormat if it’s worn or grubby. Put out an umbrella holder for spring showers. And add a mirror or lamp to make the space brighter and more inviting. Outside, dust off the cobwebs and sweep the floor. Check that mat, too, and replace it if needed.

If you still have a winter-themed wreath on the door, replace it with a hanging basket filled with greenery and perhaps artificial flowers. Tuck a plastic container into the basket first if you want to replace

Garden Notes

STOCKBRIDGE Botanical garden programs

Berkshire Botanical Garden presents:

• Wednesdays, March 8 to 29, 7 p.m. “Native Plants for Every Corner of the Garden.” This sequence of online classes, presented by Duncan Himmelman, is suited to gar-

Comfortable classic for a summer siesta

BACK IN THE “good old days” before air conditioning, most houses had a deep, shady porch designed as a place to escape the summer heat. This seasonal living space was filled with comfortable, durable furniture — outdoor pieces like swings, settees and especially rocking chairs.

This do-it-yourself porch rocker project is a great way to take advantage of your own outdoor space. Featuring clean, classic Mission styling, the chair is equally at home on the porch of an old-fashioned bungalow or beside the pool on a modern patio.

The project calls for mostly straight cuts of standard lumber (redwood as pictured, but other species work equally well) and features full-size patterns for the curved cuts.

Construction is simple. Just trace the patterns onto wood, cut out the pieces, sand and assemble. The builder’s choice of finish completes the job. The porch rocker measures about 42 inches tall by 25 inches wide by 28 inches deep.

The Porch Rocker plan, No. 894, is $9.95 and includes step-by-step instructions with photos, full-size traceable patterns and a shopping list and cutting schedule.

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deners of all levels. Sign up for individual classes or the whole series. Native Vines, Native Groundcovers: Living Mulch, Native Plants for the Water’s Edge, Native Plants for Container Gardens. Cost is $45 members, $55 nonmembers.

• Saturday, March 11, 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., “Birth of a New Perennial Garden,” online class. A personal introduction to the design principles of Piet Oudolf, one of the world’s leading naturalistic landscape designers. His work includes New York’s High Line, Chicago’s Lurie Garden, the Oudolf Meadow at Delaware Botanic Gardens, and Oudolf Garden Detroit. Deborah Chud’s five years of research on Oudolf’s gardens led to her own Oudolfian garden and the only known database of his plant combinations. Part 1 of this class traces her discovery of

PUSHING MY CART down the produce aisle in the grocery store, I come upon tomatoes, and on each of their pale skins is a small paper label asserting “hydroponically-grown.” Hydroponic plants do not grow in soil. The roots, instead, find their home either in water or else in some inert medium like vermiculite, sand, or gravel, which serves no other purpose than to support the plant. It would be a feat to raise hydroponic tomatoes in the house — mostly because of low light — but houseplants are easily grown hydroponically.

A home hydroponicum can be put together with nothing more than a wide-mouth jar filled with a nutrient solution, a stopper, and an aquarium aerator. The stopper needs two holes, one for a tube from the aerator into the solution, and the other for the plant’s stem. The hole for the stem should be larger than the stem; a plug of cotton or fiberglass wedged against the stem keeps the plant from slipping down into the drink. The jar needs a wrapping of aluminum foil to exclude light, which would promote algal growth.

To grow plants in an inert solid medium, you need two watertight containers, with spouts at their bottoms joined by a flexible plastic hose. One container has plants growing in the inert growing medium. This medium, besides vermiculite, sand, or gravel, also could be perlite, sawdust (but not cedar), or even plastic or glass beads. The other container is filled with a nutrient solution. One or more times per day, depending on how well the growing medium holds moisture, the container with the nutrient solution is raised just high enough and just long enough to raise the nutrient solution around plant roots in the other container. The larger the particles of the inert medium, the more frequently it needs to be watered.

Raising, then lowering, a bucket of nutrient solution a half-dozen times per day (as might be needed for a rapidly-growing plant in gravel) can get tedious. The process can be automated by having the nutrient reservoir set permanently below the plants, with a time-activated pump to water and feed the plants a sufficient number of times daily. Less elaborate would be a cloth wick to bring nutrients and water to a plant. The wick can be fashioned from a length of thick polyester rope, with one end in a nutrient reservoir just below the plants, and the other end coming up through the bottom of the plant container, with the rope’s end unraveled and fanned out in the growing medium.

Numerous formulas have been concocted for nutrient solutions to supply the more than dozen nutrient elements plants usually get from the soil. Anyone with access to access to a fairly simple chemistry set can make a solution from: 12 ounces of sodium nitrate, 7 ounces of superphosphate (a fertilizer comprised of half monocalcium phophate and half calcium sulfate), 4 ounces each of potassium and magnesium sulfate, and a sixteenth of an ounce of a mixture of boric acid and zinc, copper, manganese, and iron sulfate. (A useful bit of information: one ounce is approximately a half a level teaspoon.) One ounce of the above mixture dissolved in water will make a nutrient solution sufficient to feed about a square yard of growing plants for one week. The solution is discarded at the end of each week.

A simpler nutrient solution might be made by dissolving a soluble fertilizer — look for a complete fertilizer also containing micronutrients — in water. Those who prefer to feed their plants “organically” could use fish emulsion fertilizer. You’ll have to experiment a little to get the right amount to adequately nourish plants, yet not burn them from overfeeding. Off-color leaves are a sign that a plant needs more fertilizer. Drying out of the leaf margins indicates too much fertilizer.

Some experimentation is in order even using a “standard” nutrient solution (as evidenced by the fact that one book on hydroponics lists thirty-three such mixes). Rapidly growing plants need more food than slow-growing plants. Plants use more food on sunny than on cloudy days. And different species of plants like different amounts and kinds of food. Have you now been drawn to high-tech horticulture? Is there any need for soil? Tune in next time for the pros and cons of hydroponics.

Any gardening questions? Email them to me at garden@ leereich.com and I’ll try answering them directly or in this column. Come visit my garden at leereich.com/blog.