The National Gardening Association has plenty of great tips for aspiring gardeners, but we also know Fordham has some amazing weed warriors and green gurus willing to share advice on how to make this season a fruitful one. 

Preparing Beds for Flowers

As Fordham’s assistant gardener, Jason Cruz oversees the planting of 200 to 300 hydrangeas, pansies, geraniums, and sunpatiens around the Rose Hill campus. High-profile areas like the space around Cunniffe House need to look their absolute best for Easter, so the past few weeks have been all about prepping soil beds. 

To prepare the beds for the day the flowers arrive from the nursery, Cruz uses a few tricks gardeners can try at home: He mixes in soy conditioner every two years, and this time of year, he also mixes in Coast of Maine’s Dark Harbor mulch. For him, it’s both an aesthetic and a practical choice.

“We’ll plant the plants, and then we’ll throw a top dressing of the mulch, so you have this really nice dark background with all these vibrant colors.”

Planting with Pollinators in Mind

Chomri Khayi, who was hired last year as the first land manager of the Calder Center, Fordham’s biological field station in Armonk, New York, has been focused on a large pollinator garden behind Calder Hall. Her advice? For the sake of bees and other pollinators, don’t clear the ground too early.

“Everyone’s tempted to clean up everything and have this aesthetically pleasing space, but it would be wiser to minimize that cleaning as much as possible or even delay it,” she said.

She said to wait until mid to late April, when temperatures consistently stay above freezing, to clear away things like dead leaves that are carpeting the ground.

“There are beneficial insects that rely on that ground cover for protection.”

Serena Feldman, a Fordham ecology master’s student who previously worked as a land steward at the Nature Center at Greenburgh in Scarsdale, New York, recommended planting native plants when possible. Black-eyed Susans, purple coneflowers, and mountain mints are great choices, because they’re beneficial to insects and birds that are key to the local ecosystem.

“Ask yourself if you’ve ever seen a bee land on a petunia or a butterfly sit on a begonia. It just doesn’t happen because those plants weren’t bred to be valuable for pollinators in general,” she said.

Building Raised Beds 

When he moved to Patterson, New York, last year, Justin Pool grew mini pumpkins, green beans, and peppers in raised beds. Pool, a senior lecturer of biological sciences and faculty director of STEM strategic initiatives, learned from that experience not to underestimate the cost of the soil you will need to fill a bed properly. He also had some advice on materials.

“For a raised bed, plain cardboard on the bottom makes for great weed control and is biodegradable, with no nasty plastic to deal with,” he said. 

“Just make sure all the tape has been removed, lay it on the ground, and add your garden soil on top of it.”

Potted Plants for City Living 

Annika Hinze, an associate professor of political science and director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program, relies on pots to plant outside her house in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale.

“Two years ago, I discovered that Stew Leonard’s sells bags of pollinator seeds for around five bucks. I found them to be super potent, and the first week of April is the perfect time to start them,” she said. 

“I also have a rhododendron, which is about to bloom. It makes the prettiest pink blossoms, and my mom, who passed away in 2021, helped me buy it. I like to think she’s saying hello every time it blooms.”

Caring for Indoor Plants

And if you live in an apartment, indoor plants also react to the changes in temperature and light that the spring brings. Khayi tends to 16 plants in her Manhattan apartment, including a very large monstera deliciosa.

“With the heat on during the winter, they tend to dry out a lot,” she said.

“So around late March, I start to feed them a little Miracle Grow every two weeks just to increase or to help them come out of the dormant phase.”

Adrian Kochanowicz is also paying special attention to his indoor plants. 

In August, Kochanowicz joined Fordham’s Office of Military and Veterans’ Service, and he brought three plants to his Lincoln Center office: a calathea medallion; a philodendron hederaceum; and a Aglaonema Siam Aurora, also known as a Red Chinese Evergreen. 

They get no light from the sun (he uses a grow light), but they still react to the change of the seasons, so he’s also started to fertilize them every two weeks. His advice is to water less, as it’s very easy to overdo it.

Over a two period, ticks undergo a series of changes as they emerge from eggs, seek out a blood meal from mice or larger animals, and mature from from larvae to nymph and adult. They typically go dormant for a single winter, but he noted that they have the ability to survive a second freeze if the need arises.

“You’re getting two overwintering periods for each tick cohort. So its really complex, and its really efficient when you see how successful this parasite has been in nature.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Calder Center, we sat down with Pool to learn more about his research there.

Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., director of the center, said the research being conducted in labs there is more important than ever, as every major problem we face today has a biological basis at some point.

“When we talk about global warming, it means forests are changing, vector-borne diseases are coming into places they’ve never been before, world hunger is becoming an issue as our population size is likely to outstrip carrying capacity, and landscapes are going to change with rising sea levels.” he said.

“So if we don’t have people at ground level making good decisions, going to meetings to talk about the value of conservation, and understanding the fact that climate change is a function of human activity, then it’s going to lead to further and further hardship down the road. That’s the value of having an educated populace. Certainly Fordham sees that, and we see it here at Calder.”