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 Local news and information covering Blue Hill, Brooksville, Brooklin, Castine, Deer Isle, Isle au Haut, Penobscot, Sedgwick, Stonington and Surry, Maine. |
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Green Thumbs
by Caroline Spear As fall winds down, gardeners put their gardens “to bed” for the winter. These annual chores include cleaning out the vegetable garden of spent plants and weeds, spreading an inch or so of compost and turning the soil lightly to disrupt the breeding cycles of insects. Potted plants should come inside or be turned into the compost pile, the pots scrubbed and put away for the season. Garden tools should be cleaned of mud and lightly oiled to prevent rust, then stored where they will remain dry. Rake up and compost leaves. Shredding them first with your lawn mower will allow them to compost more easily. There are several schools of thought on putting perennial gardens to bed. • Don’t do a thing. Leaving everything standing in these gardens gives great fall and winter interest. Whether beautifully frosted in fall or poking through a blanket of snow in winter, the different shapes and muted shades of the spent garden can rival the spring or summer beauty of the garden. If you don’t do a thing in fall, then cut everything back in spring before growth starts to avoid damaging the new growth. • Cut down selected garden plants. Some, like iris, will harbor disease over the winter. Cutting them back to an inch or so above the soil will prevent that. If you’ve had problems with diseased plants during the growing season, don’t compost that debris, but bag it instead and send it to the dump or burn it (safely and with a permit). • Cut back everything. This saves a lot of work in the spring. Once the soil is cold and plants are dormant, cover the beds with loose hay or spruce boughs, but don’t use fir boughs since the needles drop very quickly. The idea behind covering beds is to keep the ground frozen and prevent plants from heaving out of the soil during freeze/thaw cycles. Once a plant’s roots are exposed this way, it either won’t thrive the next year or will die. Remove coverings as the ground thaws in spring and as plants sprout. Trees and shrubs are not affected by freeze/thaw cycles, but don’t prune in fall—wait until late winter or early spring. In all cases, hope for good snow all winter long; it’s the best insulator there is. Compost what you cut back if it’s not diseased. Chop up long and tough leaves, like iris, and make layers of the garden debris several inches thick with about an inch of soil or finished compost between to speed decomposition. Cover the compost pile for the winter with a layer of straw or a sheet of plastic to shed rain and snow. Now, sit down and take a rest, wait for the seed catalogs to arrive and then start planning for next year. |
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