The following is a list of some simple projects to consider. A couple are “quick hits” that will add some interest to your garden right away; others will take a little longer to yield their results.
Winter Sowing
Fall is a good time to order or gather seed for winter sowing. If you have never raised plants from seed in the winter, it is a far cry from the chore of raising seedlings in the spring. Winter sowing seems almost too easy. The process can be as simple as broadcasting a few handfuls of seed over a garden bed – a technique frequently used here in the Winterthur garden – or it can involve sowing seeds into pots that you leave outside through the winter. Either way, you won’t need to do much with your winter-sown seeds until spring. This technique works best with native plants, perennials, and hardy annuals. For more information about winter sowing there is a winter sowing website and a forum on houzz.
lily-of-the-valley fruit with seed ready to be harvested
Hardwood Cuttings
Some plants are easy to propagate by cuttings, especially hardwood cuttings. Hardwood cuttings are taken in late fall through winter from woody plants such as forsythia, willow, and dogwood. The pencil-thick cuttings should be taken from last season’s growth and should include two sets of buds. Insert the cuttings directly into a nursery bed or plant them in pots that are heeled-in somewhere in your garden where you won’t forget them. The Royal Horticultural Society website explains the process clearly. Your cuttings should begin leafing out the following growing season and yield plants ready for transplanting by next fall.
Plan and Fine Tune Plantings
One of my favorite activities in fall is walking through the garden with a cup of coffee and several rolls of flagging tape. Enough of the garden is left from the growing season for me to remember what was successful and what failed, making it easy to tie flags around the plants that need to be removed, divided, or moved. I also like to put stakes and flags as placeholders in the ground for plants I want to add, which helps me make up my shopping list for next spring. The flags I use are color coded: white for removals (white = trash), green and white striped for divisions (2 colors = divisions), and red for additions and relocations. Fall can be a great time to shift plants to new locations. Most plants look bedraggled and sad in the fall anyway and will recover, for the most part, by the next growing season.
Buy Discount Bulbs and Plants
Fall is an excellent time to find bargains at local nurseries and on-line retailers. Just as the plants in my garden already look bedraggled, but will transplant fine, so too do many of the plants at my local nursery. On-line bulb retailers will often offer deals on overstocks of bulbs; sometimes discounting them up to 50%. This is the time of year I find myself purchasing plants and bulbs for trial purposes. For example, I have often contemplated adding a variety of the poet’s daffodil named ‘Actaea’ to one of my borders and routinely find it on sale, on-line, for half the regular price. I’m going to purchase a few dozen more just to see what the drift will look like in the border next year. If they are successful I’ll order more and add to the drift; if they don’t work I’ll pass them on to a friend or compost them.
Appreciate the recommendation. Let me try it out.