After a wet February, March might even bring more rain, hopefully tapering off by month’s end.

Meanwhile, start your summer vegetable garden seeds. Watch for peach and apple and plum trees to bud and bloom. Notice bugle lilies open orange and pink and white flowers. This is the start of spring!

Vegetable, herb and flower gardens

This is the perfect time to start seeds for summer vegetables, herbs and flowers so they’ll be big enough to transplant just as the weather warms. Want to learn how? Sign up for my Easy Seed Starting Online Course or one of my Easy Seed Starting In Person workshops and I’ll turn you into a superstar seed starter. Whether you are in person or online, I provide your supplies and guide you from seed through harvest.

Seeds to start now

• Summer veggies including tomatoes, basil, summer squash, jalapeños, eggplant and more. Start these seeds in containers indoors.
• Start annual herbs and flower seeds including borage, basil, calendula, sunflowers, marigolds, zinnias and cosmos. Start these seeds in containers indoors.
• Sow cilantro, parsley, beets, carrot, turnip and radish seeds directly into the soil.

Get your garden beds ready for spring planting

• Let your cool season crops finish, then pull them out.
• Cut cover crop plants at the base so roots decompose in place. Layer the leaves over the soil as mulch. They’ll soon decompose, too.
• Test and repair your garden’s irrigation.
• Top off garden with fresh compost (not planting mix, not potting mix), plus worm castings and organic vegetable fertilizer. Water well.
• Install sturdy trellises, wire mesh cages, etc. to support rangy plants like tomatoes and vining plants like cucumbers, climbing squashes, luffa, watermelon, pumpkins, etc.

Fruiting trees and shrubs

• As the weather warms, restart watering deciduous fruit trees: pomegranate, apricot, peach, apple, etc. Always water for the same number of minutes, but gradually water more often into spring, and then summer.

• Apply organic fruit tree fertilizer to stone fruit, apple and pear trees. First, pull back all the mulch under the entire canopy to expose the soil. Next, sprinkle fertilizer over all the bare soil, to the edges of the canopy. Top with worm castings if you choose. Water the soil/fertilizer/worm castings well, then replace the mulch.

• Fertilize organic citrus and avocado the same way, using citrus and avocado food.

• As you harvest citrus, monitor plants for ants plus aphids (green, black or reddish specs on leaves and stems), mealy bugs (tiny fuzzy white spots on leaves and stems) and scale (tiny, hard-bodied brown or black ovals along stems and leaf petioles). Often, leaves covered in powdery, black sooty mold is your first clue to these pests in citrus.

• Don’t fertilize fig trees, pomegranate, pineapple guava, tropical guava and loquat, but do mulch them with a 3-inch or thicker layer of coarse wood mulch. Water deeply but only occasionally as the rains end. After that, water only occasionally through summer (or not at all if you are close to the coast).

• Harvest loquat fruits to eat out of hand or to make chutney and other relishes.

• Blooms attract pollinators to your garden. They visit flower after flower in search of nectar and pollen, unintentionally fertilizing each bloom, which then morphs into a fruit. Flat, wide, open flowers attract bees. Tube-shaped flowers attract butterflies. Add both to your garden for good pollination!

Ornamental perennials, shrubs, vines and trees

“Right plant, right place” is more than a cliche. It is a guiding principle of a successful, low maintenance garden.

Choose the right size plants: How tall and how wide are the spaces you are filling? If you match the mature sizes of your plants to the size of the spaces, you’ll rarely need to prune.

Know your garden’s rainfall: Select plants native to your community or to areas with similar amounts of rain. Those plants need little — if any — irrigation.

Winter cold and summer heat: Plants that tolerate the highs and lows in your garden are more likely to live long and healthy lives.

Discover your soil: Does the soil drain fast or slow? Dig a hole 2 feet wide and deep (or as close to that as you can). Fill it with water and let it drain. Fill with water again and time how long it takes to drain. If water drains within a day, that’s well draining. If not, it’s heavy soil. Choose plants that match your soil.

Wildlands/wildflowers

Last August’s storm has already inspired early blooms, and recent intense rain is expected to make for a terrific wildflower year overall. Track the blooms:

Before you head out to see wildflowers, check the flowers that bloom in the areas plan to visit. Watch for native verbenas, lotus, native deerweed, native onions, fiddlenecks, native snapdragons and many more.

Heading for a local chaparral hike? Look for native mariposa lilies such as pink blooming Calochortus splendens, bright yellow with gold speckled Calochortus weedii, and white blooming Calochortus dunnii. Enjoy these bulbs in habitat. They are very challenging garden plants.

NEVER pick wildflowers in the wild, DON’T collect cuttings or dig up plants, and NEVER collect seed pods. Those flowers make the seeds that ensure a new generation of plants next year and for years to come. When you remove flowers and/or seeds, you threaten the future of these generations of wildflowers. It is illegal as well.

Maintenance

• Groom Agave, Aeonium, Cordyline, Furcraea, bromeliads and other rosette-shaped plants that make new leaves in the center, old leaves at the bottom wither and dry. Pull them away.

• Check Agave roots for South American palm weevil. The weevil’s young (grubs) eat the roots, turning them into a stinky, liquid pool. Dig out, seal in a bag, and trash (not greenwaste) all parts of infested plants.

• Flush out the centers of bromeliad plants in the ground. Turn potted plants over to shake out water, then refill with fresh water. Sprinkle Mosquito Bits into the water that collects in the center of the leafy rosette.

• Start watering plumeria when leaves appear towards the end of the month.

• Start fertilizing roses with slow-release fertilizer.

• Pull fallen leaves out of potted plants.

• Refresh your garden’s mulch. The goal is a 3-to-4-inch layer over the entire garden except a patch of bare soil, 5 or 10 feet square, for native, ground-dwelling bees. They are great pollinators and very rarely sting humans.

• Weed, weed, weed, weed, weed. Pull weeds out by the roots or cut off the top growth with a hoe. Do it as soon as you notice the leaves. DO NOT let weeds flower. Those flowers contain the seeds for next year’s crop of weeds.

How to add color to your garden

Do you dream of making a beautiful, drought-resilient garden filled with color and interest? Join me for my March Third Thursday webinar, “Hot Color, Dry Garden,” when I’ll talk about adding color to your garden using plants, accessories, architecture, and more.

I’ll talk about colors that work best in our climate, ways to combine colors, where to find inspiration for color palettes, and unexpected color combinations that work beautifully in the garden. And of course, I’ll talk about plants that fill your garden with beautiful hues! Register for “Hot Color, Dry Garden” at bit.ly/HotColorWeb.

Sterman is a garden designer, journalist and the host of “A Growing Passion” on public television. She runs Nan Sterman’s Garden School at waterwisegardener.com.