The weather has finally cooled off enough to enjoy spending time in the garden. We’re chomping at the bit in fall to pull the overgrown weeds, plant our spring bulbs, reorganize our plantings, and put out a fresh layer of mulch. Any efforts we make now will pay off when the garden reawakens to look that much more beautiful next spring—with a few exceptions. There are some fall gardening tasks that truly are not worth your time and effort. Give yourself permission to skip these six fall garden chores that are actually a waste of time.
Cutting Back Perennials
It’s tempting to tidy up the garden in fall, but the birds and insects would prefer otherwise. Many insects spend the winter hibernating in hollow stems, while birds feast on seeds from coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, zinnias, cosmos, and more. You can remove dead annuals and neaten your most rangy perennials by trimming them slightly. If you have a reseeding plant that’s become too invasive, just deadhead the flowers. Try to leave stems behind rather than cutting everything to the ground.
Pruning Trees And Shrubs
Fall is not a good time for pruning woody plants, so you can put this chore off until late winter or early spring. Don’t bother deadheading hydrangeas, either. The blooms will dry and make the winter garden more interesting. With spring bloomers like azaleas, wait to prune later in spring after the flowers have faded. Of course, you can remove dead branches from trees and shrubs at any time.
Bagging Leaves
Yes, we’re being serious. There is rarely a good reason to spend time bagging leaves, unless you happen to enjoy leaning over repeatedly to stuff them into bags and lug them to the curb. There are much better uses for leaves that don’t require so much labor. Chop them up when you mow and leave a light layer on the lawn. Dump them around your trees as mulch. Put them in the compost pile or use leaves to start a new lasagna garden this fall.
Fertilizing Flowers
Because most plants go dormant in winter, fertilizing is not useful right now. In fact, some plants can end up with frost damage if they produce new growth too late in the fall. We don’t recommend fertilizing anything in the fall except for cool-season lawns and new bulbs that you are planting.
Composting Diseased Plants
Don’t waste time gathering up disease-ridden tomato, squash, and cucumber plants to put in the compost bin. We can almost guarantee your compost pile isn’t hot enough to kill off any pests or diseases. Toss these out with the yard waste, along with weedy plants that are bearing seeds. Add leaves, grass clippings, and kitchen scraps to your compost pile instead.
Planting Cover Crops
In theory, cover crops are a wonderful concept for farming, but they are very labor intensive for the home garden. You plant a living, green mulch in your vegetable patch in fall, then kill the plants and till them into the soil in early spring. The plants must be completely eliminated two to three weeks before you can plant anything in the garden. If you don’t get rid of your cover crop, you could end up with weeds everywhere.
A no-till approach will save you a lot of time and effort. Spread a thick layer of straw on your vegetable garden in the fall, then plant right into that composting straw in spring. Easy-peasy.
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