Henry Homeyer: Putting your gardens to bed

By Henry Homeyer
©2024 Telegraph Publishing LLC

Despite some hot sunny days, fall is fast approaching and it’s time to start thinking about cleaning up the garden and putting it to bed. No, I’m not suggesting you cut back all your perennials or pull all your vegetable plants. But October, the time most gardeners put the garden to bed, may be cold and rainy. We even got 5 inches of wet snow one October. So get started!

Let’s look at the most neglected area: the vegetable garden. By October many gardeners are sick of weeding, so they pick their peppers, pull the carrots, and quit. I recommend cleaning up each bed as soon as all the food has been harvested. So far I have pulled my garlic and dug my potatoes. Each time I took half an hour or so to weed the bed, cover it with old newspapers (4 to 6 pages) and then covered that with 4 to 6 inches of straw. That way, next spring, weeds and grasses won’t take over beds while the soil is still too cold and wet for planting vegetables.

The leaves and stems of any vegetable that showed signs of blight should be treated with care: instead of putting the diseased plants in the regular compost pile, put them in a separate pile – one that will not be used to produce compost. Spores are the “seeds” of disease, and can survive most composting. Squash family plants often have fungal diseases, as do tomatoes and potatoes.

Your flower beds need weeding, too. If you don’t use an edging tool to create an impenetrable canyon around your flower beds, it is important to pull creeping grasses and vines like ‘Creeping Charlie’ that have probably been sneaking in all summer. Use a good weeding tool to go down deep when you weed. I like the CobraHead weeder best. It’s a curved single-tine cultivator that can get below weeds so you can pull from below as you tug on the tops. It can tease out long roots of things like goutweed.

Once Jack Frost visits, you can cut back any annuals to the ground. If you pull them, you leave a bare spot for wind-borne weed seeds to settle in and wait for spring. And on slopes leaving loose soil exposed is likely to allow hard rains to wash away some of your good soil. You can pull the roots of those annuals when you plant more next summer.

I use three methods for minimizing weeding each year in my perennial beds.

• The best is to just fill every square foot of each bed with plants you love. Groundcovers like barren strawberry or foam flower will spread and fill in around the peonies and coneflowers – even if they are shaded by them. With time, most perennials create bigger clumps until weeds are shaded out and new airborne seeds don’t easily find a place to thrive.
• The next alternative is to mulch those bare spots around existing plants with chopped autumn leaves. Chopped leaves break down more quickly than chopped branches or bark mulch. They provide organic matter to feed the soil organisms, enriching the soil. They also provide a soft landing and good places to hide for caterpillars that are ready to make their cocoons that become butterflies and moths. This fall think about running your lawnmower over the leaves on the lawn and either using a bagger, or raking them up. You can spread them this fall, or save in a pile to use in the spring.
• Since I rarely have enough leaves, the third alternative for keeping down weeds is to buy finely ground bark mulch in bulk. For big gardens like ours it would be expensive to buy mulch in bags – but for around $50 a scoop of a front end loader, I can get a pickup truck load from my local sawmill or garden center.

I recommend buying a natural-colored bark mulch. The orange or black mulch has been dyed with chemicals, and I don’t want them in my garden. Hemlock and cedar are probably the longest-lasting bark mulches but hardwood mulch may be better for your plants and the soil. Never apply more than a couple of inches of bark mulch on your beds – otherwise moisture from short rains will not seep through to water your plants. And NEVER make “mulch volcanoes” around your trees – they will rot the bark and eventually kill the trees.

When your perennials look bedraggled it’s time to cut them back. But I leave flower stalks with seeds that birds can eat in winter. These include purple cone flower, black-eyed Susans, Joe Pye weed, sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ and anything else that would feed the birds.

You can cut back your perennials with your hand pruners, but I find it slow and tedious. I prefer to use a harvest sickle or even a serrated steak knife. These allow me to grab a handful of stems, and slice right through them all. You can use a string trimmer to work even faster, or even a lawn mower, I suppose.

By the way, if you haven’t cut the tops off your Brussel sprouts yet, do so today. This will keep the plants from getting taller, and they will instead make them produce big, fat “sprouts.” I did it much earlier than usual this year, and I am already getting nice big sprouts. Kale is very frost hardy, so I will leave mine alone, just harvesting what I need for smoothies or soups. It can last until Christmas in the garden.

So enjoy the warm and sunny days of September to get a jump start on your fall cleanup. And read a good book by the woodstove on those cold, gray, drizzly of October.

You can reach Henry at henry.homeyer@comcast.net.