Re: fall clean up
- Subject: Re: fall clean up
- From: E*@aol.com
- Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 11:38:01 EDT
In a message dated 10/26/01 2:38:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time, mtalt@clark.net
writes:
<< them. All the rest stays as it is until spring when I do my clean
up. I learned early on that it is a total waste of effort to try to
tidy borders under oak trees who like to retain about 25% or so of
their leaves until bud break in spring...if I do it in autumn, I get
to do it all over again in spring >>
Marge,
Glad to hear your comments on the oaks. Everyone wants mature oaks, we have
black oaks native to this part of the world. Yes, they drift down over the
entire winter making spring a grand chase for the tons of them. We are
picking them up most of summer as well. This year they produced a bumper
crop of acorns and brought slipping and sliding in the driveway on acorns.
Here where we will have soil frozen a least one foot and usually several more
it has proved and advantage to leave some perennials standing. They break
down over the winter and protect the newly emerging plant in the spring.
This cover also retards the growth of the plants, not native to our climate,
that start early.
Either way, doing it once is enough.
I never made one of those elite compost heaps, It always seemed a great deal
of labor. There is a farm garden that can visited nearby where the owners
practice all sorts of good procedures that you can watch. They do a "sod
sandwich" affair that is mostly European. You strip sod from whereever and
cut it into strips. You make a square pile of the strips with the sods (alled
turf strips elsewhere, with the curious plural of turves) about four feet
high. You wet down this pile and cover with a tarp. In time it becomes
compost. The idea, I think, is that you can make all you need organically
(no peat) from any field area or old lawn you are not using. Then you resow
the stripped area with rye grass and do it again. This appears to me to be
an enormous amount of labor for a home gardener.
I think Bill needs to accept weed (VBG), liking dusting the house, never go
away. Also Bill, I recently read an article on weed seeds and their ability
to produce descendents. Some weeks make several types of seed, those that
germinate immediately and those that can remain for many years until
conditions are right. All have some mechanism that sustain them and cause
you to hate them.
Claire Pepldowski
NYS z4
Claire Peplowski
NYS z4
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