FALL GARDEN CHECKLIST
Five things to do this season
Imagine the view from your chair watching golden aspen leaves pile up on your lawn and brilliant barberry bushes turning red. It’s not quite the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia but with our hail-free summer, Calgary yards are the best they’ve been for ages so sit back and enjoy.
Colin Atter, owner of Plantation Garden Center in Calgary, says he is so busy with sales this fall he can’t get to his year-end inventory. Meanwhile, the people at Calgary Urban Harvest, a volunteer group dedicated to picking fruit, are so swamped they aren’t even answering my emails.
What are the garden to-do tasks this fall? Running through the leaves, gathering up the memories in your arms and hanging out in your hammock aside, here are your tasks should you choose to enjoy them:
ESSENTIAL TO DO:
Pick the fruit. If you don’t want fermenting fruit intoxicating birds, get out and shake those trees. Yes, the beautiful, heavily weighted crabapples are a photo op now but they will become a nightmare of slippery fruit on sidewalks and drunken birds smashing into glass later this year.
Atter says he noticed heavier than usual fruit production this year.
“Everything that had fruit or flowers was just insane this year in Calgary, which we don’t see that often. The trees have been absolutely loaded: the branches are just hanging down — the trees can barely hold that much fruit.”
Incredible fruit may have contributed to incredible numbers of wasps and Atter says he doesn’t sell a single wasp trap some seasons but this year he can’t keep them in stock. Still, he says that the aphid levels have been low while the wasps are surging so “be careful not to kill off every wasp, but do start picking some of the extra fruit that feeds them.”
GOOD TO DO: WATER AND PLANT FOR SPRING
“We’ve had nothing but heat and drought (this year),” says Atter, who, with his wife, Diane, has been planting more water-wise succulents than ever before in their annual pots. But the other plants — the trees, shrubs and perennials — need water now to get them ready for winter.
Also, “It is going to cool off so you want to start (planting) things like your daffodils. Don’t plant them in November,” warns Atter, “when it’s too late.”
Asked what he suggests for bulbs, Atter says he loves all the ornamental onions, also known as alliums.
“You can’t beat that bulb. I think it needs to be planted way more here. The nice thing about them is if you plant a few different varieties they’ll bloom almost all summer long. So I’ve got three to six types (altogether.) One comes out of bloom, another goes in.”
SMART TO DO: FLUFF AND REDO YOUR POTS
“What I think is smart at this time of year is going through your annual pots and pulling out dead, bug ridden, ailing, not so happy plants. And get some new stuff in there,” said Atter.
“And I just did this yesterday. I had two big planters in front of my garage. I tore out the begonias that had powdery mildew all over them and they were just suffering and looking terrible. I popped down to the garden centre, grabbed a handful of kale, pansies, dusty miller: all this frost hardy stuff. I added it up: $25 worth of plants and 10 minutes of work and my planters are brand new again. And they are frost tolerant.”
FUN TO DO: DRESS IT UP
“We’ve got guests coming from Europe so my wife and I are walking around the garden and going ‘oh man, our euphorbia looks like garbage: it got eaten by a bug.’ So we put in four Belgian mums ... a couple of kales and an ornamental pepper. I can’t stop looking at it,” said Atter.
“The colour is amazing. There are just all these colours in this one green area that was a dead part in our perennial garden. I know I am just kind of rehashing planting fall stuff, but it really does bring you blooms until November, or later.”
NICE TO DO: EDIT AND EVALUATE
It is nice to spend a fall day organizing thoughts and ideas and mindfully editing your garden. Parks, garden centres and neighbouring gardens offer inspiration.
“Walking through my yard I say ‘OK, I have way too many spring bloomers.’ So in my mind I am thinking next year I need to get some rudbeckias, some heleniums, sedum autumn joy. I have a huge blast of flowers in late spring, ear- ly summer but I really don’t have much except green right now.”
As a gardener and a garden writer, the best advice I can give is to put your feet up and bask in the glow of your garden this fall. If you focus on trouble you will see it. In this seemingly endless summer, remember one thing: whatever you do in your garden, enjoy it.