By Janet Sellers
March is the first month we can, maybe, plant some things outdoors, but only with special care and covering. I have used pine needle mulch with success to protect plants. Indoors, we can start seeds (tomatoes and other favorites) and even harvest crops from pots. Easy indoor food crops include radishes, lettuces, bok choy, and other short root plants. The fastest crops come from the cut-and-come-again kitchen scraps planted and kept in moist soil: onions, carrots, bok choy, celery, cabbage, and so on.
Starting slips of yams, potatoes, and sweet potatoes now will get a head start for earlier harvests, and they practically grow themselves into plants just by inserting them in a pot or bag of soil as long as they are protected with thick mulch outside or grown indoors until the last frost. I have a cart to wheel mine indoors if the weather gets below 40 degrees, and last fall I just popped a bunch of purple potatoes in my garden bed to see what happens for spring.
This is wild: Pine needles are not just for mulch
Pine needles have been used to create yeast to make bread—pine needle bread! Most pines can be used to make tea from the needles which have a lot of vitamin C and other antioxidants. Blue spruce pine needle yeast bread can be made using spruce tips, flour, yeast, water, and other ingredients such as beer. The needles can add flavor to the bread. (Caution: Ponderosa, Monterey, and lodgepole pine are reported to be toxic and Norfolk island pine, balsam fir, and yew pine are not really true pines and not for cooking either).
A study last year from the University of Helsinki reported that incorporation of green needle and twig extracts enhanced functional, nutritional, and technological properties of bread; the bioactive compounds showed good stability, with some showing increased content during storage. During forest logging, trees are harvested for timber or pulpwood, often leaving their branches on-site to decompose. Green needles are an underutilized reservoir of valuable polyphenols.
Helpful safe hints for spring pests
To deter hornets and wasps from places you don’t want them, deter them with a paper bag or more around the home. A crumpled brown lunch bag looks like a wasp nest and can deter a queen from nesting 200 feet away from it. I have tried this, and it works if I get the bags out in March. The fake nest traps are also available online. If you can reasonably avoid them for a season, the problem will resolve itself with the first freeze, as hornets will abandon their nests and find a new place to start fresh next year.
European hornets eat harmful insects like caterpillars, flies, and grasshoppers. They can also help control the population of other stinging insects, like yellow jackets. And European hornets are important pollinators. Yellow jackets eat caterpillars and harmful flies that can damage gardens and crops, protect tomatoes and kale from garden pests, and are a source of protein for migrating birds. They help keep insect populations balanced in natural ecosystems. These are useful to us when they live where we need them, we just need to tell them where.
The easiest (and greenest) way to deal with hornets? Soap and water spray (on individual insects). Just add a teaspoon of liquid soap (not detergent) to a quart spray bottle of water and shoot. The soap gets through their “armor” and drowns them in minutes.
Janet Sellers is an avid “lazy gardener” letting Mother Nature lead the way to easy gardening. Send your garden tips to JanetSellers@OCN.me.
Other Gardening articles
- High Altitude Nature and Gardens – Rooting out crime: How our community’s flowers protect more than just plants (2/4/2026)
- High Altitude Nature and Gardens – Mini outdoor greenhouses, cinnamon to protect soil and seedlings (12/31/2025)
- High Altitude Nature and Gardens – Festive stuff: winter beauty outdoors, indoors, and holiday acorn bread (12/4/2025)
- High Altitude Nature and Gardens – November tips, paper-bagging geraniums, compost poles (10/30/2025)
- High Altitude Nature and Gardens – Cornmeal in the garden; sweet potato leaf greens (10/1/2025)
- High Altitude Nature and Gardens (HANG) – Fall and the forest: creating soil beds and a blue spruce kitchen treat (9/3/2025)
- High Altitude Nature and Gardens – Wild Horse Fire Brigade: successful fire mitigation since the beginning of…plants (7/31/2025)
- High Altitude Nature and Gardening (HANG) – Gardening with nature’s beautiful bouncers (7/3/2025)
- High Altitude Nature and Gardening (HANG) – Enjoying nature in summer, high altitude landscaping, and weed control (6/7/2025)
- High Altitude Nature and Gardening (HANG) – May: new trees from tree branches, plant partners, bee kind (5/3/2025)