Jeff's Tips - Putting your planting beds to bed

As much as I hate to say it, winter isn’t far off. With colder temperatures and frost coming soon, it’s time to clean up your annual and perennial beds; put things to bed. Annuals can be removed anytime, if they have lost their ornamental value. Some have fizzled out already the rest will soon follow with the first couple of frosts. Annuals should be pulled out in their entirety. This alleviates them turning into mush over the winter and makes for a healthier and easier bed prep in the spring.

Perennials, plants that come back year after year, need to be cut down to ground level.  The exact time will vary with each. With so many new cultivars on the market the process tends to be more complicated these days. Simply, if the foliage has turned brown it’s time to cut them down. If they are green, you can wait to late November or early December. The goal is to cut them down before the weather closes in, but not too soon as to not allow them to continue making food for themselves, as they store up sugars for next spring. Cutting down perennials is part cosmetic and part hygiene. Cleaning up in the fall is certainly easier and leaves your beds more attractive over the course of winter. But, more importantly, the foliage often retains disease pathogens and insect eggs that will come to life in the spring. By not cleaning up debris in your beds, rodents will find all sorts of good nesting material with a convenient food source: the bark and roots of your plant material.

Ornamental grasses can look attractive left standing for a period of time during the winter. My personal experience with grasses is that by spring they have been beaten to a pulp and have broken away from the plant and are blowing around throughout the landscape. If your preference is to leave them up, tie them up with twine to preserve their ornamental value.

Also don’t forget it is spring bulb planting time. Crocus, daffodils, and tulips are a beautiful sign of the coming of spring.