It's spring and you're dying to spring out to the garden. Here's a tip from the late, great Howard Walters, writing rosarian from The American Rose magazine for many years.

Walters loved horse manure. Nary a spring arrived that he didn't exuberantly exhort the wonders of the stuff. The bacterial action of horse manure in a rose garden was enough to make the man wax poetically for half a page. Walters said his roses thought it was a special treat to get an inch or two of horse manure mulch just a week out of the horse.

"Some of the good stuff is lost by waiting for the 'well rotted' stage," he said.

Walters was savvy enough to realize, however, that not everyone has access to a horse. So he offered a recipe for "Fragrant Formula."

Although Walters didn't mention quantities, here's his "recipe."

Combine fish meal, cottonseed meal, alfalfa meal and some form of roughage, such as fine-ground bark shavings and leaves. By volume, he said, use four times as much roughage as meal.

Add some blood meal, maybe bone meal. Make a big pile, mix it all up with a pitchfork and moisten lightly. Let it sit for a week. Turn it again.

The finished product should be just like manure without having to run it through a horse first, Walters said.

Use a big pitchforkful per rose bush and give each rose lots of water. Your soil organisms and roses will go bananas over it. Your neighbors should forgive you when the roses bloom beautifully. By then they will have forgotten about the two or three days of the sharp ammonia-like odor.

Tip of the Week: Pawing the ground won't get your vegetable garden in any sooner. But a long-stemmed thermometer might. I found mine at an educational toy store.

JoAnn Robbins, an Idaho Extension agent, offers this bit of advice for timing vegetable seeds. When you plant, she said, the average soil temperature (after you've taken the seed-depth temperature for several days in a row) should fall within these limits:

*35 degrees -- plant lettuce, onions, parsnips and spinach;

*40 degrees -- plant fava beans, beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Chinese cabbage, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, greens, kale, collards, kohlrabi, leeks, parsley, peas, radishes, rutabaga, Swiss chard, celery and turnips;

50 degrees -- plant corn and tomatoes;

60 degrees -- plant green beans, dry beans, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, potatoes, eggplants, melons, cantaloupes, okra and peppers.

You should take the soil's temperature at 8 a.m. and again at 4 p.m. and average those two numbers out. Do that for four or five days, average those temperatures, and you'll surely be safe starting your garden this year.

What's bugging your garden? Write to Catherine in care of this newspaper or e-mail her at: ccwalworth@msn.com.