3 min readAfter a summer spent mowing, weeding, planting, and watering, you’re probably ready for a break. The good news? There are garden chores you actually can skip because they’re not useful. In fact, they’re really just a waste of your time and energy.
While I love working my garden and digging in the dirt, by late summer I admit to being weary of some chores. Many of these tasks have been recommended and done for generations in the fall, but horticulture is a science, so we’re constantly learning more about what’s necessary (or not!) when caring for our gardens.
Fall is indeed the ideal time for many essential tasks before winter, including planting spring-blooming bulbs, digging up summer-blooming bulbs that won’t survive winter in your climate, cleaning up the vegetable garden so bugs don’t overwinter in garden debris, and saving seeds. But other “traditional” fall tasks, such as bagging leaves, are not a good use of my time. In fact, some fall chores can be detrimental to my little backyard ecosystem. Ahead, learn the fall chores you officially have our permission to skip this year.
Raking and Bagging Leaves
If leaves cover less than 20 percent of your grass, you can let them stay. The exception to this rule is if you’re trying to grow grass, which needs sunlight to photosynthesize. You also don’t want to leave a very heavy cover on lawns because it can leave turf vulnerable to diseases. Instead, use your mulching mower to chop them up, returning nutrients to the soil, or add them to your compost bin. This way bags of leaves don’t end up in the landfill.
Pruning
In most parts of the country, the time for pruning shrubs and trees has passed. The reason? Pruning stimulates new growth, which won’t have time to harden off before freezing temperatures arrive. In addition, many shrubs such as forsythia and lilacs have already formed buds, so cutting them back now will remove next year’s blooms. While it’s okay to remove broken branches or limbs that are in the way any time of year, save shaping and trimming shrubs and trees for when they are dormant in late winter or early spring.
Fertilizing
There’s absolutely no reason to stimulate new growth at this time of year when plants are heading toward dormancy. Instead, if you want to fertilize perennials, shrubs and trees, do it in the spring with a slow-release granular type. Also, don’t fertilize new plantings you’re putting in the ground this fall. They need to push new roots, not top growth, so they can survive the winter.
Cutting Back All Perennials
If you tend to like a neat look in your garden, it’s fine to cut back perennials that often become diseased by this time of year, such as phlox, bee balm, and hostas. But leave plants such as coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, and ornamental grasses in place for birds, leaving stems for beneficial insects to overwinter, and providing winter interest in your otherwise bare garden.
Covering Your Roses
Heirloom roses and miniature roses sometimes benefit from winter protection, but let’s be real. It takes time and effort to cover them and then uncover them again in the spring, and most modern roses—especially shrub roses such as Knock Outs—have been bred to be extra-tough and don’t need coddling. I don’t cover any of my roses (and I grow about 30 different varieties), because if you can’t take the elements, you’re too fussy for my garden.
Removing Plant Debris and Leaf Litter
It used to be that we were told to remove all leaves, branches, and plant debris from our gardens to prevent disease spores from surviving, but it turns out that microbes find a way to make it into our gardens year-round. So, whether or not you clean up every stick in the fall, you’ll have diseases next year. Instead of bagging up everything to go to the landfill, leave some areas naturalized. This provides overwintering sites for wildlife, such as beneficial insects like beetles and earthworms, amphibians, and other wild creatures with whom we share our gardens and world.
