Yeremya

October is when a tidy gardener cuts the garden to the ground and feels good about it.

The hollow stems go in the bag. Those stems were winter housing. Small carpenter bees back into a cut stem and sleep there, one bee per stem, until spring. Mason bees use the old beetle holes in the wood. Cut it all down and you throw the bed out with the bedding.

The seed heads you cut are January for the birds. Coneflower, aster, sunflower, sedge. Goldfinches work them all winter.

So leave twelve to eighteen inches standing. It looks ragged in December and alive in April.

Wait until spring. When the nights stop freezing and the willow breaks, cut it then. The insects are out by then and the birds have moved on.

The garden you leave alone in fall is the garden that comes back loud.