It used to be that the first day of fall was a day that I
started looking around the garden seeing what parts needed to be cleaned first,
and what areas needed to wait for the leaves to fall before I could get into
them and do my whirling dervish moves.
Now I’m a lot less anxious to display my neat freak streak.
Instead, I leave seeds for the birds, other plants for winter interest (I’m
especially fond of the way my grasses look in the snow) and frankly I tire a
little sooner each year now, so I take it a little easier.
If you still have the energy, any foliage that is yellowing
and or brown on perennials is fine to cut down to the ground and toss it on the
compost pile. Or it you are feeling very energetic, you can snip it into tiny
pieces and leave it in the bed to break down like mulch. I am a little on the
fence on this move. I mean part of me thinks it’s crazy to remove all the dying
and dead foliage that nature creates to feed the soil, only to replace it with purchased
mulch that is trying to serve the same purpose. On the other hand, a lot of the
foliage I’m my garden has black and purple fungal spots on it, and that stuff I
don’t want to leave in the garden so the spores can reinfect my plants next
spring. Those leaves go in garbage bags and get carried off the property, along
with strings of glechoma hederacea, commonly known as Creeping Charlie, a
hideous weed that found it’s way into my compost pile a few years ago and
didn’t get cooked, but instead got spread through all my garden beds.
That said, I’m not sure that a dead bed filled with chopped
up bits of crocosmia that aren’t really going to get broken down by spring is
the right look either. So last year I decided to do as little as possible and
see how it all worked out. It was hard not having the tidied up cleanly raked
beds that I was used to. Those clean beds made me feel that I was all ready for
spring and raring to go, but instead I just left a lot of it in place and made
sure when spring came that I checked under the winter matted down leaves for
suffocating bulbs. And it sort of worked.
I know what I should really do is cut everything back, take
it all out, separate it into clean and fungal piles, and then shred the clean
pile with a lawn mower and put the shredded bits back, but boy do I not have
the energy for all that, so I’m going with the less is more look under the
belief that nature left to it’s own devices is not a terrible thing. Besides,
nature is going to help me start the clean up by breaking down a lot of the
foliage for me. Not iris leaves, those I’m going to have to chop back and
through on the compost pile so they don’t suffocate the hellebores they are
next to, but I don’t bother with hosta or daylily leaves, since the
frost and winter do a big number on those. I actually tell people that they if
they are going to cut stuff back, to wait for the frost to start the process
for them.
The iris I remove with a pair of newly sharpened for fall
pruners. They will sharpen them for a small fee at the hardware store, and it’s
certainly worth doing each and every year even if, like me you have a bunch. I also
recommend Japanese hedge shears since they make the cutting back of grasses a
divine process regardless of when you decide to do this chore. Just make sure
that when you do cut them back, you leave at least 10 inches of the old grass on
the plant or it will be too stressed to grow back properly in the spring.
I leave the bronze
fennel foliage up until the foliage has been completely stripped by swallowtail
caterpillars, and besides I like it to self seed, but I’m not a fan of dead
astilbe flower heads, so those come right off as soon as the flowers start to brown.
I think dead astilbe flowers are ugly, I think they just look too ugly for
words, and I don’t get the attraction, but I love the way the snow sits on
ancient echinaceas and leave those up as long as I can. I guess this is why
fall garden clean up is such a personal thing.
And even though I
caught myself unconsciously breaking off dead eryngium flower stakes and
scattering the seeds, I have
learned to leave the fallen leaves in the base of my hedges and in the shrub
borders of my property. I’m even getting better about leaving the leaf litter
be in beds, but I do pick them off the lawn and put them into my compost pile
as they would suffocate the grass if left in place. I live for these leaves
each year as they make the most beauteous compost with which I feed my
vegetable beds each year.
Actually, this year,
I’m trying something new in the vegetable garden. Tulip bulbs. You see each
year I dig them into the perennial beds, and in the process, I’m afraid to say,
perennials get lost. This is because I am greedy with bulbs, buying them by the
hundreds at a time, and then sometimes I need help installing them. And
sometimes my assistants are not as careful as I tend to be. So it’s time for a
change. I really like the idea of harvesting tulips more than I’m interested in
harvesting kale, besides my chickens adore kale and scratch it right up and out
of the ground. Greedy chickens. Hopefully they won’t be as hungry for tulips.
Paige Patterson
brought home a beautiful new hydrangea paniculata called ‘Fire and Ice’ because
it wrapped its little stems around her leg and wept until she put it in the
car.
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