Plant Talk

Behind on Garden Clean-Up? Three Steps to a Tidy Spring Garden...

Every spring I'm sure I've never been so far behind, but this year it's reallly true. I only got around to cutting back spent lily stalks last week...The combination of relentless rain, saturated soil, and continued cold had me pruning roses on the cusp of spring, weeding at the same time I was cutting back hydrangeas.....it was so bad that the narcissus were blooming through dead grasses, and the new growth was cloaked by old....

Dividing spring clean up into three stages organizes the work to get it done reasonably efficiently... After a long weekend of work, I'm starting stage 2....

Start by moving through entire garden with a rough clean up, beginning close to the house where you most appreciate your work. At this stage, if you get too much into the details you'll never keep moving along. The mantra is "better done than perfect" - it's about cleaning up piles of dead leaves and debris, cutting back ferns, roses, clematis, epimedium, last year's hellebore leaves, and ornamental grasses. I spent the most time tidying the strawberries (thank goodness I'd cut down the raspberry canes during that one sunny day in February), and pruning the hydrangeas and rampaging clematis. I never remember how twiggy a garden can be until I bag up all the debris too woody for my compost pile to take to the yard waste recycling center...

Key to success in steps 1 & 2 is to allow yourself to plant nothing until you're done. No nursery visits, no primroses, nothing - except I did get my sweet peas in and a few early lettuces....but this discipline keeps me motivated and at work to get to the planting stage....

On to Step 2, which is all about the soil. Now is the time to add compost, and more potting soil if need be to raised beds and containers.  I fertilize the roses, gunnera, hydrangeas, hostas - whichever plants are greedy for nutrients. I dose most perennials, peonies, and the list above with a good measure of liquid fish fertilizer (for its trace nutrients as much as anything). Now is the time for tidying up of individual plants. I pruned and tied up the Camellia sasanquas, cleaned up the pots (although I'm not sure yet in some cases which plants are alive or dead...). Lastly, weed, weed, weed - it's the moment to get rid of all those perennial weeds and freshly blown in annual weeds before they go to seed.

The last step is hard, dirty, and intensely satisfying. It's time to spread a rich, brown manure-mulch around the garden. Usually you'd water first to make sure the ground is thoroughly moist, but that isn't a concern this rainy season. Give more mulch to the hydrangeas and roses, raspberries and bamboo, but be careful not to pile it up on the crowns of perennials or around woody trunks and stems. This coating of mulch improves the soil while hiding all manner of sloppy clean up sins. The dark mulch shows off the fresh chartreuses and pastels of the spring garden and....presto...your garden is all cleaned up.

Only after step 3, when the garden is freshly topdressed and the plants are fed and tidy, is it time to clean up the gravel, plant primroses, tie up the clematis and enjoy puttering about in the  springtime garden..

Bridget supervises the completion of Step 1 and the hauling away of all the woody debris to the local yard waste recycling center...my home compost pile overfloweth...

 

 

 

The Last of the Tasks....

It's almost time to come indoors....but if you finish up a few last gardening chores before winter closes in, you'll be grateful next spring when the tasks start flying.

The good news is we live in a fairly benign and forgiving garden climate, which gives us latitude on what needs to be accomplished when. Still, to save your garden from what is predicted to be a brutal winter, and for your own mental health next spring when garden tasks are multiplying like baby slugs, here's what needs to be tidied and protected:

-Plants in pots are more vulnerable to cold, wind, drought, and too much rain. So mulch, wrap, drag indoors, into the garage, or under the eaves plants that might freeze or drown. I always bring fragrant-leafed geraniums in to scent the bathroom windowsills in winter, protect borderline succulents from wet and cold by moving their pots up against the house, cut down my gunnera and melianthus and mulch them with their own leaves, and bring aeoniums and other favorite tender succulents indoors to winter by a window.

Prune back really long rose canes so they don't blow around too much - but leave most of the pruning until March 1st. Foliage and stems protects the roses from the cold.

Once a perennial's leaves are transparent or collapsed in a wet heap, go ahead and cut it back so you don't have a pile of muck to deal with in early spring. But perennials that are still upright, like echinacea, some of the grasses, and agastache, attract and nurture birds while giving the garden structure and winter interest.

General garden clean up: Pick up diseased rose leaves, cut back brown lily stems to within a few inches of the ground, clean up rubble or piles of anything that shelter slugs and snails. Rake up pine needles, and enough of the leaves so that they don't form a thick layer to trap water that'll rot plant crowns. And keep pulling weeds until we have a really hard freeze.

But mostly you can let your garden die down naturally, let the decaying plant parts turn to rich mulch, and just let it rest as you take a rest yourself and enjoy the dark, chilly days of deep winter.......

Non-hardy succulents like this beauty need to come indoors for the winter - this one has spent the last two winters on my kitchen windowsill, moving back outdoors in summer.

 

 

 

Micro & Macro Views....

When I was cleaning up my garden this weekend, I pondered how best to go about it. Now I've long since given up trying to be efficient when I garden. I try to think of it like any other art, which means there's plenty of waste along the way, and that usually means my own time.

I think we succumb, depending on our natures, to looking at the garden very closely as we work, fiddling around with minutia when larger tasks might be more important. Or we tend to take the long view and neglect the details which make the garden so satisfying. It's so easy this time of year to be drawn into picking up every twig, tidying every plant (which reveals my nature, I'm afraid).....Or if we stand back and take the macro view, to simply gloss through the garden, cutting back the raspberry canes, piling on some mulch, whittling away at the big jobs.

If there was one thing I learned from writing "Artists In Their Gardens", it was that the artists were remarkably skilled at looking closely and getting the details right, but also seeing the garden as a whole and creating masterful atmospheres and settings. They could alternate between micro and macro views of their garden, which makes the work more fun and productive, and the result more enchanting.

So on this cold, sunny morning, I tried to look at my garden closely enough to tend to the plants that needed the most help right now, without getting wrapped up in any idea of a final spring clean up. I also tried to step back enough to make some real progress toward general tidiness. After all, it's nearly time to plant sweet peas and lettuces....

Micro view - there's so much to be done even in this single square foot of garden space....

 

Bridget contemplates the macro view of the garden in late winter...