The Garden Worm blog Digging up the best dirt on gardening!

November 13, 2011

Drive-by mulching

Filed under: Fall,Our gardens — Judy @ 9:39 pm

We’re finally getting our gardens under control for the winter and today was a good day for our usual drive-by mulching routine. Most of the leaves are down on the trees in our yard with only a few left on our neighbor’s silver maple. Instead of all the effort to rake those leaves up to the road for the town to compost, we have found that our lawn mower does a great job of chopping them up into itty-bitty pieces for our own compost. After dealing with most of the leaves under the trees and mulching them into the lawn, we rake some into the surrounding gardens. Then, after cutting down the tallest or otherwise taking care of some of the more delicate plants by manual pruning, we run the mower over the remaining debris and leaves, AKA drive-by mulching. Voilà! nearly instant compost material for the gardens and clean-up for the winter.

Update: A post and subsequent comments over at The Garden Professors talk about mulching and using leaves as lawn fertilizer here.

In the meantime, take a look at a few of the goodies we still have left in the gardens.

Carex 'Toffee Twist'

Carex 'Toffee Twist'

Crabapples

Crabapples

Forsythia

Even the forsythia has great fall color!

Grasses

Miscanthus 'Gracillimus' against the blue fall sky

Lettuce

Still have lettuce coming on

Ligularia

Love the seed heads for the ligularia!

Oakleaf hydrangea

Stunning red leaves on the oakleaf hydrangea

What other colorful things do you have showing their stuff now? Are your gardens ready for the winter to come?

November 1, 2011

Fall visit to Phipps – Part 2

Filed under: Fall,Slideshows,Travel — Judy @ 10:35 am

As you might recall from the last post, we recently visited Pittsburgh and the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens again. The visit continues here. Click to view the second part of the slideshows.

Phipps Fall 2011 part 2 slideshow

Pittsburgh was recently named a “Best of the World 2012” destination by National Geographic in a piece called “Extreme Metropolitan Makeover.” It is the only U.S. city to make that list and certainly the Phipps Conservatory is one of the reasons why. The Fall Flower Show is on until November 6th. Go visit!

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