Care for your vines and bulbs by the season

A fundamental gardening strategy is to do as much maintenance as you can during the "off seasons" of early spring and fall.  We'll give you a head start with this season-by-season guide on caring for vines and bulbs.

• Late winter: Repair your trellises if needed.
• Prune your grapes.
• Plant sweet peas and other cool-season annuals.
• Spring: Prune winter damage from large perennial vines like climbing roses and clematis, and erect or repair your trellises.
• Fertilize the established vines in your garden.
• Now's the time to plant seeds of annual vines such as hyacinth bean, morning glory, and scarlet runner bean.
• Early summer: Guide new stems of clematis, honeysuckle, and climbing roses towards their support and tie them loosely if needed.
• Prune wisteria to control its size.
• Cut or deadhead sweet pea flowers to encourage new buds.
• Late summer: Trim honeysuckles, climbing hydrangeas, and other big vines as needed to control their size.
• Pull up sweet peas once flowering subsides.
• Fertilize any climbing roses that rebloom in the fall.
• Fall: After frost kills annual vines, gather up the dead stems and foliage and compost them.
• Early winter: Repair wobbly trellises.

• Spring: After the flowers of spring-flowering crocus, cyclamen, daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops, squill, and tulips wither, fertilize the bulbs with commercial bulb fertilizer or bone meal. Leave the foliage intact until it begins to yellow.
• Fertilize crocosmia and lilies with an all-purpose fertilizer as soon as new growth appears.
• After the last frost passes, you can plant your caladiums, callas, cannas, and gladiolus.
• Early summer: Mark the locations of the spring-flowering bulbs that you want to dig and divide in the fall.
• Set out more gladiolus.
• Fertilize your caladiums, especially those growing in containers.
• Late summer: If the weather is good, begin digging and dividing crowded clumps of crocuses and daffodils.
• Fall: This is when you should plant spring-flowering bulbs of all types.
• Dig, dry and store tender bulbs, including caladiums and gladioli.
• Early winter: Where the ground isn't frozen, you can plant spring-flowering bulbs until mid December.

Managing vines and bulbs and all of the planting, pruning, and fertilizing that they require can seem daunting, but you can make it easier on yourself by performing these small tasks season-by-season. Consult this guide each season to make sure that you stay on track.