Pocono News Section

Early Easter Means Less Colorful Flowers

Early Easter Means Less Colorful Flowers - Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 9:41PM EST

Reported by: Les Still
Thursday, Mar 20, 2008 @09:41pm EST

Easter is the holiday that marks the coming of the spring season. But this Easter weekend might be a little lacking in color.

When you talk about Easter you usually think of chocolate eggs, baby chicks, or the Easter Bunny. And let’s not forget about those colorful Easter flowers.

“You’ve got your traditional Easter Lilly, everyone’s favorite. You think of Easter you think of these Lilly’s” stated Aaron Pierce, the Greenhouse Manager at Jerry’s for All Season’s in Dunmore.

However Easter Sunday this year is occurring the earliest it has in over 135 years. And if you take a look at many of the flower beds in northeast and central PA now, the flowers have hardly begun to sprout.

Pierce said expect to see those bulb plants like Tulips and crocuses popping up soon.

“Once the air warms up and the soil temperature is around 40 degrees at a consistent level. With the weather we’ve been having they should be coming up now, they should start to sprout” he continued.

The wet and dreary conditions the last couple weeks have been a mix blessing for the spring flowers.

While the amount of rainfall we have received recently has been great for the flowers. It’s the lack of sunshine that has been the biggest problem. Take a look at this hanging basket behind me. Normally if you were to come in this time of year and we’d had a decent amount of sunshine, you’d see a lot more flowering blooms on this hanging basket.

Only 4 days this month have we seen sunny skies. But all it will take is a couple more sunny days and we’ll start seeing colorful blooms like these.

Now that spring is officially here, Aaron suggests getting to work in the garden as soon as possible.

“As soon as you see the green buds start to form on your plants you should go through and fertilize.”