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In olden times when I was a girl, fall garden chores were about one thing: cleanup. Nature is messy. We let her have her fun for the summer months. When fall arrives, fun’s over. Time to sweep up the leaves that know how to party ’til they drop.
What goes up must come down, so the thought was. The rakes came out — this was before leaf blowers were invented and leaf burning was banned, exchanging one form of pollutant with another, the American way — and the bonfires roared.
I’d take kids jumping into leaf piles (before the match is lit) over-blowing and bagging if it were my call. But the best of all worlds (given the choices we have) would be if everyone just stopped with the fall cleanup.
Let the leaves stay put to insulate plant roots and minimize the damage from freeze-thaw cycles that are now a feature of winter and deadly to shallow-rooted plants.
Same with dead plants. Perennials don’t have to be cut down just because the aboveground portion is dead. The roots may go dormant but the detritus on top does what fallen leaves do: insulates. This can also be said about dead annuals.
Dead plants also shelter wildlife, and some provide food.
The time for cleaning up is spring. Then you can find another place to put last year’s dead plants. Most likely it’s the same place you’ll take the leaves you didn’t shred with the mower but left whole to insulate the garden beds. Come spring cleanup time, they’ll be added to the compost pile.
Despite the fact that you don’t have to leave home to “do something” about those leaves and in fact fall cleanup isn’t required at all, the line of vehicles waiting to enter the yard waste site near my house was several blocks long last Sunday afternoon by the time I got there. It’s now a ritual as baked in as those leaf bonfires used to be.
The good news is that most of the vehicles were crammed with leaf bags that were going to be emptied onto piles (not just tossed on top of them) that were swelling impressively from a bunch of small mounds to a single vast mountain range as I waited my turn.
Better to take them here and come back for a load of black gold in spring than to haul them to the landfill along with whatever else didn’t fit into the garbage bin.
People have finally figured out that the landfill is for non-recyclable stuff, and that organic matter, by contrast, goes on being useful indefinitely unless it’s burned, in which case the carbon dioxide it stores is released into the atmosphere and trapped there along with the other so-called greenhouse gases that are making second summer last weeks longer than it’s supposed to and turning winter into a season without reliable outdoor ice to relieve its tedium.
But still … all those engines idling made me wonder, as I so often do wonder these days, what are these people thinking?
What was I thinking, you might ask.
My trip to the site was not about leaf disposal. My vehicle was towing a trailer full of perennials and annuals that had spent the summer months not in the ground but in pots and planters.
Clay pots must be emptied in the fall or the moisture they collect over the winter will cause the soil in them to expand as warm weather returns and cracks or even shatters them.
About half my containers go indoors with the houseplants, but the “empties” are stored in the shed.
The rest of the plants in my trailer were dead tomatoes. I pulled them up, green fruits and all, tossing most of the unripe fruits into the chicken coop, there to be ignored until the hens return to full-time coop dwelling (they free range in my yard from late September, when the garden is shot and they can have at it, to whenever cold weather confines them to the coop and fully enclosed run where hungry raccoons can’t get them).
What hasn’t been picked over or turned inedible in the garden (I’m talking about the unripe tomatoes now), the imprisoned hens might deign to peck at for lack of anything else to break up the monotony of bagged kibble. Pecking for their food (as opposed to eating as dogs and cats do out of a bowl) is what makes life worth living for a chicken. That and laying her eggs where a human is least likely to find them. Their latest hiding place is a large clay saucer, about 2 feet in diameter, that I absently leaned against the foundation of the house, thus creating a tentike structure in which a chicken fits as snugly as Cinderella’s foot fit the fabled glass slipper.
Why the tomato plants don’t stay put brings up another matter we gardeners must contend with in the fall. Two matters, actually.
The first is that tomatoes (and related plants like potatoes) not only deplete the soil they’ve grown in (rotation rejuvenates spent soil) but also leave behind diseases that could infect next season’s tomatoes.
The other matter is seeds.
Not all tomatoes contain sterile seeds. Whereas most modern hybrids are sterile because succeeding generations’ fruits and flowers won’t come true and gardeners want “new and improved” plants anyway, the old-fashioned heirlooms are open-pollinated, meaning they will both come back and also come back true. (This means they won’t revert to a previous version because there isn’t one to revert to.)
Any good-sized tomato that wasn’t started from seed indoors most likely won’t ripen in time to be eaten. This is normal, of course, albeit heartbreaking for me, as I’m not a fan of fried green tomatoes. This is why the hens get them, minus the frying.
What’s not normal is summer weather lasting so long that the plants that germinated in July were able to produce edible fruit in October, and not just the cherry and grape tomatoes either, but even the beefsteaks.
So getting back to clean up, the second trip I took with my trailer full of dead plants was to another waste site, this one several miles from my house as opposed to two blocks that takes trees and shrubs.
Whereas perennials and annuals turn to compost over the winter, the best reuse for woody plants is as mulch. The task of our civil servants in charge of recycling trees and shrubs is to grind them up. This requires powerful chipping equipment, not the temperature gauges deployed to keep compost cooking at just the right temperature.
Mulch in the form of both wood chips and more finely shredded woody material is donated to the public free of charge for the very good cause of protecting our summer gardens from weeds, moisture loss through evaporation and a host of other problems that have only gotten worse with climate change.
Speaking of, I should be telling you how to plant spring bulbs — it’s that time of year — except that I planted mine last month when we had that early freeze, on the assumption that my window of opportunity was about to slam shut.
Well, it didn’t. It is still safe to plant any bulb (most notably tulips) that will have enough time in the ground between now and May to grow roots from one end of the bulb and a stem from the other. The ground is not yet frozen to the depth of 6 inches a tulip bulb must have to stay alive until it goes dormant.
How was I to know we’d have a second summer lasting well past Halloween? At the rate our fall weather is going, Thanksgiving could be 70 and sunny too, and maybe even Christmas.
All I care about at this point is that we get some precipitation. Rain, snow, sleet. I’ll take it.
We’re told to keep on watering, especially our trees, as long as the ground hasn’t frozen hard, but I’m wondering how trees and shrubs are supposed to absorb water once they’ve gone into the plant version of hibernation. This applies also to those tulip bulbs.
I mean, most of my trees and shrubs have lost their leaves and are busy hardening up the protective covers of the leaf and flower buds scheduled to open in 2023.
All but the European copper beech are looking like deciduous trees are supposed to look at this time of year, which is half dead. The beech is still resplendent.
This tree is always the slowest to leaf out and also the most reluctant to defoliate. In early summer it looks like it’s either dead or dying. When it finally does get around to unfurling its gorgeous reddish-gold (yeah, the color of fall) foliage in late June, the previous year’s leaves are still hanging around.
And I do mean hanging, just by a thread in some cases. Sometimes I get sick of looking at them and spend an hour pulling off the ones I can reach, just out of frustration. imagining they’re the reason the new leaves are coming in so late (they’re not).
As I write this, the beech tree outside my kitchen window has yet to show any sign that its leaves are aware that Halloween has come and gone. I keep telling it that summer is over. It pays no heed.
Being copper-colored the leaves don’t radically change hue in fall as most trees do, but turn from copper to fiery red with gold highlights. That lasts until about midwinter. Then they fade to russet and by spring are not just the color of potato skins — they resemble them in other ways too.
My guess is that it’s something about the copper birch’s preferred hardiness zone, not USDA Zone 4 but maybe 6 would be about right.
I think it’s just massively confused.
Aren’t we all?
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