Spring bits and pieces

Here's some bits and pieces that have popped up along with the spring flowers. First, remember when planting new trees and shrubs, especially those that have been grown in plastic pots, to tease out pot bound roots. A large blunt screw driver or a large plastic tent stake work effectively to dislodge and tease out pot bound roots before planting. Teasing out roots is rather like combing out tangled hair or like getting a lump of chewing gum out of the coat of a Maine coon cat. The cat doesn't chew gum, and the child had no idea how such a thing could happen, but some local anesthetic was needed, in this case a couple of sardines. When a cat's nose & mouth are so occupied they notice little else.  So if  you want successful transplants you would do well to untangle root balls. 
Second, now is the time to plant early kitchen garden crops. Broccoli, spinach, lettuces, and the like, do very well in cool weather especially under a floating row cover. To maximize yield with minimal space use some interplantings. TPP's best such trick is to plant broccoli at about 18" spacing, and then interplant with bibb or romaine lettuce seedlings. The lettuce will mature and be ready to harvest before the broccoli would crowd it. 
Third, this is the time of year to prune things. Sorry TPP can easily show you how to prune, but it's hard to describe, hard to use hard fast rules because trees and shrubs vary. It's so easy when you know how woody plants grow but so hard to transfer that knowledge verbally. 
Fourth, nothing says spring as much as woodland wildflowers, perennial ephemerals that grow fast, flower, and fruit before the leaves above close the canopy. Our earliest are liverwort, trilliums, and bloodroot. Nothing is more cheerful than finding these small plants poking up through the leaf litter. If you have a shady, tree-covered portion of your property, then this is one of the easiest of all natural gardens to develop.

A quiet, seldom-seen woodland wildflower in these parts - blue cohosh

In over 3 decades of botany here in the upper midwest, TPP has seen blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) in the wild exactly twice. As the specific epithet suggests, the thrice compound foliage looks quite like the leaves of the meadow rue (Thalictrum, in the buttercup family).  Blue coshosh might be a bit more common that suspected, but it tends to escape notice.  Appropriately enough one hides in our woodland behind a screen of bluebells.  One of the reasons it escapes notice is that it's purplish-blue hue tends to help it hide. What confuses quite a few people is that the flowers are 3-parted and the same greenish, bluish color as the foliage, however three-parted flowers are common enough among basal dicots.  It's a member of the Berberidaceae, and most of the members of the family with which people are familiar are shrubs rather than spring ephemerals.  Blue cohosh has quite a reputation as a medicinal plant and was widely used by native americans as an abortive agent atesting to its toxicity, which may explain why it's one thing the bun-buns don't eat.