The spring of 2016 will be remembered as a short spring and a very short summer followed by a short fall — all within four weeks between March and April. Those 70-degree days in mid March stimulated the vegetative buds in many woody ornamentals to swell, causing the winter bud scales to drop to the ground. This left the buds susceptible to damage by freezing temperatures.

As the trumpets of daffodil petals herald spring, we see clumps growing in roadside banks as well as in gardens. Pretty as they are, the flowers in those large clumps are not as large as those of single plants or smaller clumps. Crowded bulbs are smaller bulbs and thus produce smaller flowers due to a lower reserve of food.     Professional gardeners dig up and thin out clumps of daffodils every five or six years. This practice allows them to not only maintain flower size but to also expand plantings.

My old friend Bill Burton and I once discussed eating freshly harvested rhubarb as kids during hot summer days in New England, where every home had a rhubarb patch in the backyard. Bill raved about his mother’s rhubarb-custard pie, while I raved about my mother’s strawberry-rhubarb pie. I can still picture myself sitting on the back stairs of our home with a fist full of sugar in my left hand and a freshly harvested stalk of rhubarb in my right. Before each bite, I would dredge the base of the rhubarb stem in the sugar.     Those were the days.

Onions are good for your health, and generally they are easy to grow. Let me give you some advice on growing them successfully.     Plant onion sets and you’ll harvest only green onions. Most sets you buy are short-day onions, which produce bulbs only when grown during the winter months with 10 daylight hours or less. Planted in the spring, as daylight hours grow longer, they produce only onion tails, your green onions.

If you received Easter plants, you’ll be able to plant some of them in the garden to enjoy again next year. Others are best recycled by composting them.

Warm-season grasses, including Zoysia and Bermuda grass, should be banned from Chesapeake lawns. They cause nothing but problems. Lawns planted with these grasses have to be fed monthly May through August with high-nitrogen fertilizers. They must be sprayed yearly with restricted-use pesticides to control billbugs and other insects. They must be mowed close to the ground, so they often become infested with weeds, which requires the frequent use of herbicides. The clippings must be collected and the lawn dethatched.

A couple of years ago, I initiated a demonstration on growing vegetables in bales of straw using organic fertilizer and chemical. My test consisted of preparing the bales in two ways. On one, I applied three pounds of 4-3-4 Holy Tone Organic. On another, 2.5 cups of 10-10-10 fertilizer. I kept both bales wet until their internal temperatures were equal to those of ambient air.

Be ruthless. It’s time to chop ornamental grasses and butterfly bushes. Cut them down to the ground.     Also remove the old flower stems and old foliage of sedum to make room for new growth.     In addition, it’s time for serious pruning of lilacs that are over-grown or infested with stems borers. Trim azaleas, rhododendrons, cherry laurels and hollies that make it impossible to look out of the bedroom or living room windows. Some of the branches that you cut can be brought in and forced to flower.

If you planted a cover crop of winter rye or wheat last fall, most likely the grass is six to 12 inches tall by now. Use your lawnmower to mow the grass as close to the ground as possible. Mowing saves you time in tilling the soil and helps to dry it, making it easier for the tiller.

A Bay Weekly reader who has tried and failed many times asks how to grow cactus plants from seeds.     It’s possible. Here’s how.     For growth, cactus plants need full sun, dry conditions except for a few days of rain in the spring, sandy rather poor alkaline soil that’s hot in the day and cool at night. These are exactly the same conditions you must satisfy to be successful in germinating seeds.