Fall Garden Thoughts

The next few posts will be articles I wrote for the North Star Monthly, a Danville, Vermont journal first published starting in 1807 and reestablished in 1989. I love the paper and you will too. info@northstarmonthly.com.

Fall Garden Thoughts

2019 gardening is drawing to a close. Gail, Alex and I are all tired but know we’ll miss driving to the farm every morning, opening the gate, meeting new people and seeing new things maturing. It’s been a strange but wonderful year to say the least. It started out in April with snow that kept falling followed by water that flooded the fields and kept the Winooski River too high for me to safely install the water lines and pump. Mother Nature put some things on hold but then the sun came out and energized everything.

Since those April days, many things have happened. We had the best season in over thirty years and that meant customer and visitor counts and gross sales increased. There were many, many new customers and more tourists from around the world walking the gardens. Sadly, there were regular customers who we know moved out of Vermont, could no longer garden physically, downsized their homes and lost their gardens, or even passed on to another world. We are sorry for the losses no matter what the reason because gardening friendships are tight bonds you never forget.

So now it’s fall and the leaves have fallen except for a few birches and poplars and the needles of the tamaracks, the conifer that loses its needles each fall after they turn bright yellow. Fall clean up has become somewhat of a controversy and my philosophy falls somewhere in the middle of current trends. Like it or not, leaf raking became a tradition in the days when people had to have a lawn with green grass and no weeds. Raking the lawn including cutting down the gardens and raking all sorts of vegetation including the leaves and putting everything on a compost pile or bagging it for a trash pick up. The trend has changed somewhat. If you have a lawn and have tree leaves, you cannot allow the leaves on the lawn for long or they will kill the grass. I have a lawn vacuum that shreds up all the leaves and pushes them into a bag. It works great for me because I use the shredded leaves between the rows of plants in our propagation fields or on display gardens between the plants. That has positives and negatives too. Moving leaves into the garden, shredded or not, puts weed seeds, insects and fungal issues there too. My most despised insect is the stinkbug, especially the Brown Mamorated Stink Bug which is a slightly larger version of the green one that has always been with us. When they are touched let alone moved through a shredder-vac, they let you know they are there with a very noxious odor. I think the benefit of the shredded leaves outweighs the negatives. I prefer maple leaves because they come from a native tree with deep, deep roots that stores many inert minerals in the leaves—minerals from deeper in the earth and beneficial things we probably don’t think much about. Leaves that should be avoided are leaves from trees with tannin such as oaks, butternuts and walnuts. Those leaves contain a chemical that deters seed germination and indirectly might impact any flower or vegetable seeds you plant directly into the soil.

As for our flower gardens, I leave them to themselves until spring. Our gardens are planted with a mix of plants that have birds and other pollinators in mind. By leaving the last of the flowers, the birds have plenty of food for the first part of late fall into winter before the snow gets deep. In their own way, spent flower stems with snow as a backdrop provides a picture of where we have been during the previous season.

Fall and early winter is a time to prune trees and shrubs. Pruning is a strange affair.  It is ever so easy to do and pruning is the way to go but surprisingly many people are afraid to prune because they think they will kill their favorite tree or shrub. That’s far from true. There are many great books and YouTube videos out there on pruning but if you just can’t make yourself prune, you can hire people like my friends Nancy or Kate who have created businesses out of pruning. If you think you want to give it a try, ask me and I’ll offer the confidence you might need to get started.

Before you leave your gardens for the winter, take a few photos to serve as a reminder to what you have and what plants you might want to add, delete or better care for come spring. And remember our tag line here at the flower farm:  “We’re always here to help you grow your green thumb!” 802-426-3505 or 3506 in season. vermontflowerfarm@outlook.com. http://vermontflowerfarm.com