In the garden: When a bee lies sleeping …

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about some ways you can make your garden a welcoming habitat for beneficial insects such as butterflies and bees. Now that we’re gradually starting to wind down our garden chores for another year, it’s important to think about their welfare in the way we approach fall cleanup. 

Actually, I don’t really do all that much to get my garden ready for winter; spring is when the big labour happens. You’ll want to dig up any stray weeds, pull up spent annuals, and maybe trim and tidy things up a little for aesthetic purposes, but that’s about it.  

It’s not necessary to completely raze your garden down to bare soil at the end of the season — and in fact, many garden experts do not recommend it. Exposed soil tends to dry out more quickly, and freeze-thaw cycles can break it down and destroy the crumbly texture that makes for good growing conditions.  

If you choose to supplement your garden soil with compost and extra mulch, you shouldn’t go overboard with it in the fall. Some types of beneficial insects actually burrow just a few inches below the ground, and if you disturb the surface too much or bury it in extra inches of mulch, you’ll bury them too. 

There’s another way to condition your soil in fall that has the inestimable advantage of being both much less work, and free. Don’t just rake up and bag fallen leaves for collection; instead, just pile them liberally onto your flowerbeds.  

I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do this. Leaves are a great natural mulch that slowly breaks down into compost over the winter, and it protects your beds from harsh winds, slicing rain and bitter cold. It’s also a heck of a lot easier on your back than piling them into leaf bags and dragging them out to the curb week after week.  

 If like me, you are blessed with a number of big trees shedding their leaves onto your property, you don’t necessarily have to pile all of them on your beds. But enough to pack down to a nice soft layer several inches thick once the trees are bare is pure gold. (They do naturally compress once in place, and probably faster than you think.) 

Along with the fact that leaf litter is a free banquet for your garden next spring, it serves a more crucial purpose: it’s a prime winter shelter for many species of butterflies, moths, bumblebee queens and carnivorous insects that help control bugs you don’t want in your garden, like aphids and earwigs.  

The hollow stems of things like peonies, daylily stalks and grasses are great winter homes for insects as well. Next spring, when you do tidy them up, gather them all in a hidden corner of your garden and leave them alone for a few weeks; the little guys are probably still sleeping in there, and bagging the stalks for collection kind of defeats the purpose. 

Another advantage to leaving up things like grasses, black-eyed Susans and other plants that have seedpods is that they provide food for birds that have stayed here over the winter. I happen to like the look of them too: they form a kind of austere beauty, poking up above the snow, and they mark where the bones of my garden are lying hidden — inspiring me to even greater plans and dreams for next year.