Putting the Garden to Rest

INTRO

There’s a chill in the air and a PSL warming your hands as you look over your garden - what was once green and growing is starting to die back and turn brown - and an urge starts to rise inside you. An urge to raze it to the ground…

Wait! Hear me out on this….

Are you raking all the leaves and putting them in the trash? Cutting dead stalks to the ground? Pulling everything back to the bare soil?

OMG NO!

At some point, someone may have taught you this was the ‘right’ way to put a garden to bed at the end of the year. I mean, it feels pretty intuitive. When you ‘clean’ a room you might do something similar - but the ‘indoors’ follow different rules than the ‘outdoors’

What I described above is the ‘old’ way of thinking about closing up shop on your garden - but when we learn better, we do better - right?

THE BETTER WAY

During the long, cold winter the primary focus for wildlife (and humans for most of our history) is ‘stay alive.’

We have fairly harsh winter’s in Southern Ontario so I want you to shift your focus in the fall from “cleaning” the garden to “keeping it alive” instead - so how do we do this?

KEEPING THE SOIL ALIVE

The soil in your garden - whether it’s a big yard or a few pots - is absolutely teeming with life and it’s so much more than something that just props up your plans.

Aside from rocks, minerals, and decaying organic matter, one teaspoon of soil contains:

“one billion bacteria, several yards of fungal filaments, several thousand protozoa, and scores of nematodes”

And helping these guys get through the winter will greatly benefit your soil - and happy soil makes for happy plants.

Food

When you’re raking your leaves this fall, instead of bagging them up for the trash, drive over them with the mower to make a leaf mulch. This mulch can be applied around your garden beds. All summer long that tree was pulling nitrogen up its trunk and depositing it into its leaves to keep them healthy. When the fall comes, those leaves and all of their precious nitrogen fall back onto the garden

Have you ever noticed the 3 numbers you see on bags of fertilizer at the garden centre? That’s called an N-P-K number and that N stands for Nitrogen. It’s an essential element for plant growth that you can buy in its chemical form at the store…or you can just put some leaves on your garden bed in the fall to add it back in.

The organisms in the soil also eat nitrogen, along with a ton of other elements that are released by decaying plant matter - so adding it back to your bed helps to feed the soil through the winter.

Water + Shelter

Mulching with dead leaves also accomplishes another task - keeping the soil covered and moist.

My gardening mantra, that I obey above all, is “NO BARE SOIL". This is because soil that has no plants or mulch on top of it will dry out quickly in the sun. The upper layer will start to lose moisture and the organisms that live there will begin to retreat further down or face death.

Covering it up with mulch will keep the top-level alive and moist (god I hate that word, but it’s really the right one to describe what we’re looking for lol)

A soil with no moisture, no nutrients will have no life and becomes a dead soil.

So when you’re starting thinking about putting the garden to rest please remember the little guys that live in the soil and make sure you’re providing food (via decaying organic matter), water and shelter (via soil cover that keeps the moisture in).

KEEPING THE ANIMALS ALIVE

The next group we need to worry about are all the creatures, great and small, that call your garden home.

In the winter some species will hibernate but many stay active and searching for food and shelter through the cold months and we can help out by doing our fall clean up properly.

Try to resist the urge to cut your dead plant stalks all the way back to the ground because when the snow starts to fall it’ll “blanket” itself over the stalks - creating hollow, covered spaces for small animals to use as shelter or pathways to move through the garden.

When we cut everything back, a large blank expansive of snow is created. Akin to a desert for a small animal - with no shelter and nowhere to hide from predators like hawks and owls that might be watching from overhead. Much like the microscopic life, they’ll be forced to leave your yard.

Leaving your yard naturalized will encourage wildlife to take up residence so they’ll leave their dropping and discarded meals (lots of nutrients for the soil!) and so your space becomes known as a good place to live by the neighborhood life.

Once the spring returns, they’ll help to balance your micro-ecosystem greatly! It’s much easier to have them already living there than to try and encourage them to move back in.

THE BEEEEEEEES!!!!

We can’t talk about the environment and ecological minded, organic gardening without mentioning our besties The Bees

If you take all your bee knowledge from the media then you’d be forgiven for thinking bees only live in big hives, with queens and make tons of honey for bears in crop tops to eat - but that’s not totally true.

The majority of our native bee species in Southern Ontario are actually solitary and live and reproduce on their own. Several of these native species need hollow, dead tubes for their young - like from large grasses and annual plant stalks. At the end of the summer, they wiggle inside and lay their eggs which stay dormant over the winter and then hatch as the weather warms up.

Are you thinking about the stalks you’ve cut down in the past? The baby bee genocides you may have committed over the years?

It’s okay! But now you know about the precious lives that are developing inside them and hopefully will keep that in mind as you tidy your garden this fall.

If leaving the dead stalks standing is not something you can handle seeing, another option is to cut them down very carefully, bundle them up and leave them in a corner of your yard over the winter. Once the summer is in full swing and the bees have left you can safely dispose of them (many creatures may have taken up residence in that stick bundle so be mindful of that too).

SUMMARY

I hope you feel confident now to go into the garden for your fall clean up armed with knowledge on how to keep it alive and thriving through the winter. It’s easy to think of our garden as just plants only but what you want to be working towards is creating a full and balanced ecosystem whether you’re gardening in containers on a balcony or many acres.

Our gardens are the entire world to the living things that inhabit it - we need to think about protecting their only home just like we’ve started to think about protecting ours.

And if you don’t feel confident or maybe want to learn to more I’m always here to help! Along with my full garden maintenance packages, I also offer one-off garden work - perfect for fall cleanups. Check out my services page for more info.