 Hi, I'm Megan Humphrey, and I want to welcome everyone to this workshop with Charlie Nardosie, and I am the Executive Director of Hands, and we get food to low-income seniors around the county. And we have four different programs that we do. One is the upcoming holiday dinner on Christmas day, and we'll be delivering meals, and don't tell anyone but gift bags all over the county. And we also have Hands in the Kitchen, which is nutrition education workshops. We started a new program in March because of COVID, and we call that support buddies, and we match buddies and seniors who need meals delivered or just occasional phone calls. And then we also do these great Hands in the Dirt workshops with Charlie. And of course, typically we'd be at people's places, and we just can't do that this year, so we've gone online. And we would like to thank Hannaford Supermarkets and AARP Vermont, and CCTV for helping to support this, and then also get it online. So if you want to watch it again, or you know someone who would like to see it, you can check at cctv.org. And once this is edited, it will be up there, and it will also be on our website at handsbt.org. So today we're going to learn about, sadly, how to put gardens to bed for the season. Some of us aren't quite ready for that, but that's what we're going to do. So Charlie, thanks so much for doing this, and please, you know, I'm sure I'll learn more from you today. So welcome, everyone. It's nice to see you all here. Yes, this is the end of the season. We're almost at the end of October. So we've had a great season, a great spring, summer, and fall, and hopefully your gardens have really flourished during this time period. And I thought we would do one last, one of these webinars of meetings or presentations talking about what to do in the fall with your garden, whether it be a flower garden, what to be planting now, what to do with the vegetable garden, what plants to bring inside, what plants not to bring inside, all that kind of stuff. So welcome. I'm Charlie Nardosi, and this is Getting Your Fall Garden All Wrapped Up for the Season. Thank you for coming, and even though it's a heartbreak to have to do this, this is the time of the year to do a lot of different chores in the garden, whether it be cutting back different flower gardens or vegetable gardens, cleaning up gardens, doing some soil building in your garden, planting some certain things, other things need to be planted, bringing some things indoors. We're going to cover a whole bunch of things like that. So fall gardening chores. I've done this talk a number of times this fall, and you can see this was a slide that I put on originally in September. Probably the gardens don't quite look like this anymore, but you probably still have some color out there, especially if you're in warmer areas, like in the Burlington area, along the lake, places like that, you could very well have a lot of things blooming. We still have monks good and anemones blooming in our garden. We're out in Ferrisburg, but of course the leaves are much further along than that tree there. So let me talk about different chores to do, and probably the one of the ones I want to start with is one that you have been doing all summer long, but you really need to keep up with it, especially in the fall, and that's fall weeding. So you really need to kind of keep on top of the weeds, especially the perennial weeds, and these could be things like dandelions, burdock, quackgrass, ground ivy, or creeping charlie. A lot of these perennial weeds, if you don't take care of them now, and at least cut them back, or at least push them back a little bit, maybe you don't get all the roots out, but at least you knock them back a bunch. What will end up happening next spring, if you don't do that, is that you're going to have those weeds coming up first and your plants trying to grow through them, thinking again, a flower garden, a perennial flower garden, for example. So being on top of it now is really important. I know it's the last thing you want to do in October is to do more weeding, but after a good rain, you can go out there, pull out these weeds, get as much of the root system as possible, that will give your garden a leg up on these weeds next spring. You'll also may notice there's a whole bunch of self-sewing annual flowers, and if you've grew calendulas, or nicotianas, or verbinas, or kleomies, a lot of these plants will drop a lot of seed, and then next year, you see the calendula on your right, on your left there, is what the garden looks like in the spring. All those are calendula seedlings. They all will germinate, and you'll get a thick mat of them, and that might be fine for some gardeners. Some gardeners kind of like that natural look, but even if you like the natural look, you still need to thin those out. So for example, we leave some calendulas in our garden, but we'll thin out about 90% of those seedlings. We're only going to leave a handful, because you don't want plants to be overcrowded. Now if you don't want to have things self-sewing, now is a good time to make sure you're cutting plants back, and especially cutting them back before the seed set, before those flowers turning to the seed pods that'll drop the seeds. But even if you do that, we have verbena, verbena bonariensis, it's a tall spiky purple flower. We let it go to seed in our garden a number of years ago, and every year now, we cut it back before it goes to seed, but we still get hundreds of them germinating, because that's how much seed can be dropped in one season. So if you're not into the self-sewing annual flowers, you want to make sure you deadhead things. If you are into them, do some editing, I like to call it, in the spring, so you don't have as many of them, and they're not in the places you don't want them. But there are some self-sewing flowers that you want to keep. These are not necessarily perennials, but actually biennials. Holly Hawks and Fox Gloves are two good examples of these. These are flowers that'll drop their seed in the summer, and this time of year, you'll notice at the base of your Fox Gloves and your Holly Hawks, a little plant, a little kind of baby version, you might say, of a Holly Hawk, no flower stalk, just the leaves that are down there. You want to leave that, because that's going to be the one that produces the flower stalk for your next year, for your garden. But if they are, just like with a clendule, it's too close together, you might want to thin them out a little bit, give them a little bit more spacing, so they don't get overcrowded. An overcrowded flower is not going to bloom very well, so it's not just a matter of being overcrowded, but it also is about the quality of the flower you get in the long run. If you have an area in your flower garden, or your vegetable garden for that matter, that has got overrun by weeds. You couldn't keep on top of it. There's a lot of weeds in the garden. What are you going to do? One of the best things to do this time of year is to cut it way back with a mower, and then put some black plastic on it, or a tarp on it, something that's going to be impermeable to light and water and air, so that you can seal it down with boards or rocks, and that's going to be a way to try to reclaim that area for next year. If it's not that heavily infested with perennial weeds, you might be able to just in the spring pull that off, put some compost in, do some good weeding in there, because you're not going to kill everything. Some things are still going to grow up, and you'll be ready to go. But in most cases, you might have to leave that tarp down there, maybe for a whole year even, if it's really tenacious. And you have to watch out, because next year they could, they could, even once you take it off, they can creep back in. You could see here on the right that scallop-shaped leaf is all ground ivy or creeping Charlie. So that's ready to move back in again. But at least you get a jump on it by putting this tarp down now, so that next year if you try to plant in it, you at least have weakened those plants enough that you can get your plants going before they start taking over. There's been some new thoughts about how to do fall garden cleanup, whether it be in the vegetable garden or in the flower garden. I want to extend that to folks to see if you haven't actually started cutting back a lot of your flowers and vegetables yet. You might want to consider doing some of these things that I'm going to talk about. The first one is what I call the dog command technique. Leave it, leave it. This one is if you have cone-shaped flowers like Black Eyed Susan or Rebekia, Echinacea, Helinium, Teasel, anything that forms a cone. Inside that cone is tons of seeds. And if you just leave those plants after they drop their petals, even after the foliage dies and you have like this Black Eyed Susan here sitting there, leave those cones out there, the birds are going to love it. We love to sit in our window and watch gold finches and chickadees and some of the smaller birds come in and just feast on the Black Eyed Susan or on the Echinacea cones that are still left out there. So we leave those in the garden well into November, even December sometimes. We're in no rush to get rid of them. The reason is it takes a long time for them to clean them out. So let the birds have their feasts. Let them have that natural bird feeder that's sitting right in your garden so you don't have to clean it out. And then come back you know on a warm day in November or December and when it seems like they're pretty much done then you can cut them all back. The other thing is that when you are cutting them back we want to leave it, same command, leave the debris in the garden unless it's really heavily insect or disease infested. So I'm going to go back to this one because you could see our peony in the background there is heavily infested with powdery mildew. I'm not worried about that. You can still cut that back and leave it there because powdery mildew is a fungal disease that is naturally going to occur in the environment no matter what you do it's there. How much you get really depends on weather than on how much the disease inoculants in the soil. So this is a day Lilia. We cut back but any of those other flowers just cut them back chop them up into little pieces leave them on the ground. I use a hedge trimmer to do that. And the benefit of this is for the beneficial insects. So you're going to create a habitat for these insects to overwinter. You're also protecting the soil from erosion and from the cold and thawing and protecting your perennials that are there as well. And you're also leaving some of the caterpillars that are probably in a cocoon or a pupa stage to overwinter. The reason you want to leave the caterpillars is that in the spring when they emerge as little caterpillars, little babies, they're going to be food for the nesting birds. So as long as you're okay with your garden not being all neat and trim and all kind of cleaned out and all you see are some little stumps of perennials and a lot of brown soil. I really recommend people cutting down the plants and leaving that foliage around there. It'll decompose in the spring. Plants will grow right up through it. It'll help add organic matter and food to your soil. And you might want to leave some flowers like these hydrangeas because they look nice. They're aesthetically pleasing. Hydrangeas are a beautiful one. Of course all the ornamental grasses are like that too. But they're nice to have something to look at out in your yard even if it is brown or it has dead seed heads on it. It can have a nice feel to it. It's when the wind's blowing and it's blowing it around. It gives you a little remembering to what it was like in the garden last summer. Either before or after you cut things down though you want to add some compost. Compost is really a necessity for a flower garden and a vegetable garden. You want to put a couple inch thick layer down. I usually recommend you do this and then you put a mulch on top of it. So either you chop it, those material that I was just talking about and leave it on top of the compost, or you come in with hay or straw or chopped leaves. Just don't leave the compost exposed. I'm really a proponent of covering up all your soil all the time. And the reason is you don't want it to get exposed from the wind and the cold and the rain, washing out nutrients, washing away some of that compost, especially if you have a strong wind. Having organic matter on there will hold it in place. You also may want to do some mulching. We usually just do this more around trees and shrubs than around the perennial garden, but we'll mulch our pathways through the perennial garden, for example. And we use wood chips or you can use bark mulch, but now is a good time to do it because you get a jump in the season. A lot of the things we're doing now is trying to get a jump on next year, next spring, because you have a hundred other things you're going to need to do in your garden. One of the things you could do this time of year, even though it's getting a little late, you can still probably get away with it, is dividing perennials. So the rule of thumb with dividing perennials, perennial flowers, is that if it blooms in the spring, you divide it more towards summer or fall, late summer or fall. If it blooms in the fall, you divide it in the spring. So if you have spring bloomers like peonies and irises and nepotas, those you can divide anytime from mid to late summer into the fall. If you have fall bloomers like asters and sedums and bleeding hearts in the spring, sorry, got my dates mixed up. Japanese and enonies, those you want to divide in the spring. So this time of year, we're dividing peonies. So it may be a case where you're going to divide it, or it might be a case where you just want to move it. And this is a good time to transplant peonies, especially if you're in the warm area, like in the Burlington area, near the lake, those kind of places. If you're in colder areas, if you're watching this and you're up in an underhill or a stow or places like that, you probably don't want to be upsetting your peonies this late in the season because the ground is going to freeze up fairly quickly for those spots and the peony roots won't get established. But for everywhere else, you can dig up the plant and find a new place for that. What happens with peonies is that they are decades-long plants. They are very long-lived. So a peony that used to be in full sun two decades ago might be in shade now because of the trees and shrubs growing around it. So you could dig it up, move it to a sunnier spot, amend the soil compost, replant it, making sure that crown of the plant where the shoots and roots meet is only a couple inches deep and then just leave it there. Maybe mulch it and just leave it there. That will be fine. I would not divide a peony this late. You probably should have divided peonies back in September, maybe early October. Again, we're getting later into October now, so it might be an issue. But if you're not dividing, you're just moving to get to a sun your spot. I think you can go ahead and do it. You might have had some of the overwintering subtropicals out there. So like gladiolas and dahlias and cannalilies, all of these to overwinter in our climate, they are going to need to be dug up and put into a warmer place. They are subtropical bulbs, and so they will not survive anything colder than zones eight and nine. So gladiolas, we did a while ago actually. Once the flower stalks were done, we cut those off. And then once the leaves started yellow and we dug up the little corns, we took off the old corn on the bottom and left a new fresh corn that's on the top. We put the whole corns and bulbs into a garage that was warm and not too bright, but warm and had good air circulation and left it there for a couple weeks. Once they were nice and dried and cured, we put them in onion mesh bags and they're hanging in our basement, which stays between, I'd say 35 and 50 degrees. They'll be fine there all winter long. And in the spring, you pop them out. They might even start growing a little bit. It's a warm basement and you put them in the soil and you have even more gladiolas next year. For the dahlias and for the cannalilies, it's a little bit different. So if you still have them blooming or growing in your garden, great. I mean, our cannalili just died. We just got a killing frost last week that killed that, but the dahlias seem to be still going strong. So we're going to leave them there as long as possible. But once the frost is killed back all the foliage, or if you're just sick of them, you just have that enough. I'm done with them. You can cut them back, even if they're green right now, just cut them back to the ground, dig out that clump, try to knock off a lot of that soil. You'll see that there's a whole bunch of these, almost sweet potato like roots or tubers that are under there. Don't want to wash them, but you just want to let the soil dry out and knock it off as much as you can. Put them again into that warm garage or shed or place where it's out of direct sun, but it's a warm place where they can cure for a week or two. And then once they're cured, you want to store them in that cool braids basement. I just mentioned 35 to 50 degrees. And these you want to put either in a bucket or a cardboard box or a wooden box, or even in a perforated plastic bag that has either wood chips or slightly moist and sawdust or peat moss in it. And then you just want to leave them there. And you want to check them, though, every month or so throughout the winter. If they start shriveling, if those tubers start getting kind of wrinkly, you might want to miss them with a little water because they're being dehydrated. If they start rotting and getting soft spots on them, you might want to pull them out, let them dry out a little bit, then put them back. But other than that, they're pretty carefree. And the spring is when you would divide off all those different tubers because each one of those tubers creates a new plant. So you could have a dolly with 10, 15 new tubers on it that you get 10 or 15 new plants for next year. But you'll do all of that in the spring. Right now, you just want to get it through the winter. If you want to expand your garden, and make some new beds, lasagna gardening. Hey, you're going to be in that doze without talking about the lasagna. The lasagna garden is a really easy way to do this. So instead of breaking your back by digging up the sod or digging up a weedy area, you can just cover it over with organic matter, kill it that way, and then plant right in the top. So how we do it is we have a newspaper. So we have seven, or we have seven days, seven days, a great newspaper to make lasagna with. So you put a layer, probably four layers of newspaper down over a really low mode area. So you kind of scalp the lawn or scalp all the weeds that were in there. Then put the newsprint over it, and then put a six to eight inch thick layer of hay or straw on top of that. And then probably a two to three inch thick layer of compost on top of that. Now this works in most cases. You can see we're just doing this in our lawn to expand the flower garden, and it worked beautifully. In the spring, all we did was came in, dug a hole into the compost, put our plants in, they grew fine. Because by then the newspaper is breaking down, and all that hay mulch is starting to break down. If you have an area with really tenacious weeds in there, like golden rod or brambles, like wild raspberries, things like that, you might want to use instead of newspaper cardboard. So just take the staples and the taping off of that cardboard, lay it down on the ground, and then just put the layers that I was talking about, the six to eight inches of hay or straw, and then the compost. You might want to put a thicker layer of compost, like an extra layer in the spring, only because that cardboard won't be broken down by the spring. So you might need a little more depth as far as your material. Now if you don't want to just leave the compost exposed, like I was talking before, you can put an additional layer of hay or straw on top of it too, just to kind of protect it in the winter. This is a great time of year to plant bulbs, and so of course all the spring flowering bulbs, the tulips, the daffodils, the hyacinths, the crocus, all of them can be planted now, and have to be planted now by the way, because they need to have that winter dormancy in order to flower and look beautiful in spring. First of all, the ideal bulb soil is a well-drained, kind of loamy soil, like you would get in the river bottom. If you think of places where they grow bulbs commercially, like in Holland, or Michigan, or Skagit Valley out in Washington, the soils there are very well-drained, beautiful, almost sandy loam soils. If you don't have that, if you have like a clay soil, all you really need to do is raise up the soil, create a raised bed, and then plant in that. The only time I've really lost a lot of bulbs when planting in our garden is when we planted them in clay soil without amending it, or right out raising it up, and they just rot it all winter long. So that's what you want to do as far as planting them goes. When you're planting them in the holes, if you want that big kind of botanical garden, public garden show that you often see, you want to plant them pretty close. So here this gentleman's putting in these tulip bulbs, I'd say about three to four inches apart, so he's putting a lot of tulip bulbs in, but you'll see what ends up happening. He puts them in that depth, and as far as the depth of the bulb goes, you want to make it two to three times the height of the bulb deep. So if your bulb is two inches tall, you want to make it about four to six inches deep. That means the bottom of the hole is four to six inches deep. You can do a big hole like that, or you can just take a auger that you attach to a power drill, and just drill holes in and drop them in that way. Either way, this is the effect you're going to get. If you put that many bulbs in that close, you're going to get that beautiful tulip bed that just looks like you walked out of a professional garden. But you have to plant them that close to get that effect. You probably want to avoid this look. At least this is an aesthetic that I don't really appreciate, where you kind of put your bulbs in a row or one here, one there kind of thing, and it really doesn't have any cohesiveness to it. It's just kind of lining them up like little soldiers. Probably though, the easiest way to use spring flower bulbs is to mix them into your gardens that you already have. So instead of making a separate garden, mix them into your perennial flower gardens or your annual garden beds, for example. You can see in this case, how they've done that, and they still planted them in clumps. You can see clumps of similar kind of bulbs throughout this area, but also they're mixed in with the perennials like the premulas there that are blooming. So or if you have a bleeding heart, you might want to put some around that. Thinking in terms of the colors that will work there, and also what kind of color perennial flowers you have, or even flowering trees you might have. This is a nice way to kind of mix and match them in the landscape, so you can really have them as part of a landscape as opposed to their separate bed. Now if you're in an area that doesn't have a lot of space, you don't have a lot of room. You might even be in a townhouse or apartment, or you're renting, and you only have a small space to really grow bulbs. You might want to consider layering the bulbs, and this is how it works. So you dig your hole, and you put the biggest bulbs in the bottom. So say you have some big daffodil bulbs. You put those down in the bottom, maybe six to eight inches deep, put some soil over it, and then the next size bulb, maybe a tulip bulb, medium-sized bulb, you put that down three or four inches deep, put soil over it. Then at the top, you put your small bulbs, like the silla, or the kind of doxas, or the muskari, well muskari is the same thing, the snow drops. Anything that only needs a couple inches deep in the soil, you put it there. What will happen is that through the soil, these bulbs will grow up at the times that you deem them to grow up, and you get this effect where they could either all be blooming at the same time, like in this picture with the grape hyacinths, tulips, and daffodils all blooming at the same time, or you can stagger them. So you can get early, mid, or late season tulips, and early, mid, or late season daffodils. So maybe you have it so your grape hyacinths are up, and then right after them come your mid-season tulips, and then right after them come a late season daffodil. That will extend that flower show in that little area of your garden for weeks. Whereas if you just did all one bulb, you might get the flower show for a week if you're lucky, maybe four or five days. But if you extend it with different bulbs that come up at different times, then you can go for weeks in the spring with color. You can do a similar thing if you want to force bulbs in containers. So this will be happening this time of year because your bulbs are going to need, again, that dormant period. They're going to need three to four months of cooling and chilling before they'll be able to grow next year. So you get your container, you put a layer of potting soil in it, and then you can do a very similar thing that I've talked about, this showed you that cross-section in the container. So you have your big bulbs on the bottom and the smaller bulbs towards the top. You won't have to worry so much about the spacing or the depth of them within a container because you have potting soil, which is very easy for them to grow through. But the idea is the same. They will come up and after they've gone through their dormant period, being in a 35 to 45 degree basement, garage, wherever it may be, it might have, just leave them there. So plant them now, put them in the pot now, put them in there. So in four months from now, which will put you out to end of February, early March, then they'll be ready to grow. And then you can either bring them out and put them in a sunny window indoors, and then they'll force themselves up and flower for you, probably in April. Or you can wait till April, May, then put them outside like they did here. And then some of those containers might be all one bulb, like the grape hyacinths, that white one, or the one on the far right. You can see is a mix of tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils. So you can have that same kind of mix. They will have one flower coming in after another flower. So you don't skip a beat and you can have them blooming for a long period of time. If you do this technique with potting soil, you'll have a better chance of getting those bulbs to come back again next year if you plant them in your garden. So after these are done in the spring, the foliage starts to yellow, you plant them in your garden, and maybe they'll come back for you again next year. If you force them in water, that would not happen. And then another way to grow bulbs, of course, is to naturalize them. Everyone loves this beautiful kind of meadowy look of different kinds of bulbs. There could be a mix like this with many different kinds of bulbs. It could be all one type of bulb, like these crocuses in a lawn, or these daffodils by the roadside. But the idea, oh, another one, or these kamathia. Kamathia is a really cool bulb. It's kind of an unusual one because it grows well in the understory here under these birch trees, but it also grows well in wet clay soils, which most of the other bulbs don't. So if you have that condition, you might want to try growing some of these, and they naturalize. So the keys to naturalizing your bulbs is to protect or to select the right kind of bulb for your planting. You don't want to do the hybrid hyacinths and tulips. You want to do bulbs like the psyllas, the kind of doxa, the kamathia, I just mentioned, crocus, species tulips, which are those small little tulips, and daffodils. They all do really well in a naturalized setting. You want to put them in a place that gets good light in the spring and has good well-drained soil. So this could be in a forest as long as it's a deciduous forest. You don't want to plant them near evergreens, but if it's under a maple tree or some other trees, it's fine. As long as it gets light in the spring so that that foliage can grow out and rejuvenate that bulb that's in the ground. And you want to make sure, you know, they're probably going to be very highly visible in the spring. So you're okay with a shaggy look because you have to manage them. And that may mean not mowing the lawn if you have them growing in a lawn area for weeks afterwards. We have a neighbor who has psyllas, those blue little flowers, in her front yard, and they are gorgeous when they're blooming. Her whole front yard looks like a big blue wave. But she has to leave her lawn there because you want to let the foliage yellow before you cut it back. So she doesn't mow till early June, and it gets pretty shaggy. But it's important, not only for the bulbs to get rejuvenated, but also for that bulb to reproduce and form the seeds that'll drop, that'll spread around. You also may watch out if you have a wildflower meadow where you're growing bulbs for competition from other plants. If you have grasses or goldenrod or any of those brambles, those kinds of plants that might be taking over that area, you might have to mow them down a couple times to make sure that your bulbs are getting enough light and they're getting rejuvenated so they don't have too much competition. So you can naturalize them. You just have to do the right steps to get there. Now you often may have bulb problems. I got a little squirrel or a chipmunk or mice and bowls. Those are really common problems you find with bulbs. Moles, by the way, are not really a problem because they are carnivores. They're not really interested in the bulbs. But they do create the tunnels that the mice, bowls, and chipmunks will come in and then they'll eat your bulbs. The mice and bowls are particularly interested in tulips and crocuses. So there's a bunch of other bulbs that they don't like. And so maybe you just want to grow those like fritillaria. Fritillaria or a crown imperial is a really cool bulb. It stands up two feet tall in these different colors. And it exudes a chemical into the soil that the mice and the bowls don't like. It's a natural rodent repellent. So you can plant just a bunch of fritillarius. That'll work. A bunch of daffodils. They don't like those. Orcillas that I was mentioning my neighbor's lawn has. Or alliums. They don't like the flavor of any of those bulbs so they'll kind of leave them alone. So you can plant those instead of the tulips or crocuses. Or you can mix and match the tulips and crocuses in with these and confuse the rodent so they tend not to find them. Another thing you can do is take crushed seashells, crushed oyster shells, or crushed gravel and put that in the hole when you're planting. That creates a sharp area where they have to tunnel through and they don't like doing that. So that's one way that'll physically stop them from getting to your bulbs. Another thing you can use is a mole and bowl repellent that has castor oil as the main ingredient. So castor oil is not the stuff you get in the grocery store but the stuff you would get in a garden center has a very strong pungent smell. So you can just get it in a pelleted form, sprinkle it into the hole when you're planting and that will keep them away as they're tunneling through. They smell that, they go somewhere else. If you're really desperate and you've got a tulip that your grandmother used to grow or some kind of special bulb that you really want to make sure it survives, you can create bulb cages out of hardware cloth. So this is half-inch mesh hardware cloth and I have some crocuses in this little container. I just fashioned it into a little basket, sink it into the ground at the right depth and bury it in the soil. So those holes are big enough for the sprouts of the crocus to come through but of course the mesh is thick enough that the rodents won't get it. So that's another thing you can do. So moving on, if you have some trees, some young trees, you want to put a tree guard around them this time of year so that the mice, the voles, the rabbits don't girdle the bark of that tree over winter. And you might want to protect your evergreens but not like this. You don't want to protect them this way. This is using burlap wrapped around that dwarf Alberta spruce. The one on the right looks like some kind of character from a zombie movie. I'm not quite sure what that is. But you don't want to do that because these materials like the burlap will whip moisture away from the evergreen and it actually can cause more damage than if you didn't do anything at all. The best way to protect evergreens is with the mulch wrapped around them using some stakes around the plant. So the stakes are going to create some airflow around it and you don't get the leaves in contact with the burlap as much so they're less likely to dry out. You're really trying to protect these plants from the cold winter winds because that's really going to dry them out more than anything else. And doing the burlap this way, we've done it for years and it's been very successful and the plants come back year after year. Of course you want to protect young trees especially if you're out in the country from Bambi and friends. Yes they would love to munch down on your trees especially young ones that have those young twigs and really create a mess in your garden. And then finally for protecting shrubs, there's some shrubs you can protect so you can flail flower better. Anyone know what this one is? Yes it is. It's a hydrangea. This is your blue hydrangea sands the blue flowers and this is unfortunately what happens to them sometimes and the way to get more blue flowers earlier in the season is to wait until Thanksgiving or early December that all the leaves drop on your shrub like this and then get some wood chips or bark mulch and bury the bottom of that shrub just about a foot deep and leave the other stems sticking out and then just leave it all winter and then in the spring you'll see where it's dyed back based on what kind of winter we had. Remove some of that bark mulch from the base so there you can see that's been really protected so you should have some live buds there and then you can just prune back to those live buds wherever they are and those branches that come from those buds will form blue flowers earlier in the season so you won't have to wait till October to get any signs of flowers from your plant. That works well with hydrangeas and with hybrid flowers uh flop hybrid rose flowers so that would be the hybrid tea, the flora bundra, granda flora roses, any of those hybrid roses that aren't that hardy here you want to protect the same way with the bark mulch. If you're growing species roses like Rosa Regosa, some of the Canadian explorer roses like William Baffin or some of the landscape roses like Monica and the flowering carpet roses those are hardy I've never had a problem with them they come back consistently every year. Let's chat a little bit about vegetables so there's not really a lot to be done this late in October as far as planting more vegetables but there's a few things you want to keep in mind and I want to just kind of quickly run through those. First of all remember what we did with the perennial flower garden we didn't remove all of those flowers we chopped it and left it you can do the same thing with your vegetables so as long as those vegetables aren't insect and disease ridden like this broccoli wasn't I just chopped it all down with my hedge trimmer my favorite tool for doing this and I just leave it there and then in the spring what I do is I come back and I just put a couple inch thick layer compost over the top of whatever is still left there a lot of it will decompose already and just plant right through it now it might look a little messy all winter it might look a little messy in the spring you might have little stumps kind of hanging out here and there just work around them and by summer you'll never even know you had any kind of other planting in there. What this does is it doesn't disrupt the soil structure and it protects the soil through the winter and those are two key things for a raised bed vegetable garden you want to keep the soil structure so you don't want to be digging it up all the time and tilling it under or digging up and pulling roots out and you just want to leave those things to naturally break down and that's going to encourage all the soil biological life to eat those materials provide more air spaces and better growth for your plants next year. You can be pinching your Brussels sprouts so if you have not done this already you just want to pinch the top four inches or so off of the Brussels sprout plant and that will lead you to get more Brussels sprouts forming along the stem if you're having a hard time getting them to form it's still not too late to pinch them I did mine probably about three or four weeks ago and I've got a whole host of Brussels sprouts out there but I still think you can do it this late and get the results that you're looking for. If you have a few tomatoes left you remember you know you already probably know this that anytime they show a little color you can pick them put them in a warm place and they will just continue to ripen and tomatoes are one of those plants that I do not chop and drop because they are very disease-laden so I do remove the tops of those but I don't dig the roots out I just cut them right at the ground level take the tops out of the garden and leave the roots there to break down. Planting greens so it is kind of late to go out and seed any greens this late in the season but if you have transplants for whatever reason they probably do okay and if you could protect them you might be able to squeeze in if not a little baby greens this season some greens it'll over winter for the spring the best greens to grow this late in the season would be things like spinach and arugula because they're very cold tolerant they'll grow quickly during this cold weather the limiting factor this late in the season we're growing anything is the short days you know we just don't have the light levels that we normally have in June and July and August so by October we're really getting the same light as we have in March so it's not that bright out there and plants don't grow very fast but if you can get them up and growing and moving along then you can protect them and you're protecting them not so much to eat this year but for next spring you can put down a floating row cover this is a remade type material that the regular weight one will protect plants down to 32 degrees there's a winter density one or winter weight one that protect plants down to 24 degrees you don't have to worry about how cold it's getting because things like spinach and arugula are pretty tough i've had spinach over winter without any protection in the garden sometimes they're pretty tough plants and they'll withstand some freezes but if you want to protect them this is a nice material to use i use the regular weight one now and then when it gets really much colder in November put the winter weight one on just leave it all season long just leave it there and in the spring you can pull it off you'll see that there's live new growth coming from your plants you can also grow in cold frames and here's a few that i just kind of fashioned over the years this is one i i think i spent 30 dollars on this i went to a salvage yard and got some windowpane some salvage lumber and some hinges and that was it and this will add a month or two year growing season in the spring and in the fall so you can start this is actually a spring crop of greens that i started like in late march and i was eating it in april or you can do it in the fall if you have some greens out there that you started the spinach or the arugula if you can put this cold frame over the top of it keep it nice and warm right into november you'll get a plant that gets big enough that hopefully you'll make it through the winter you do have to ventilate these so even in october november you get a sunny day you can get too hot for your plants so you want to be able to go out there open up those windows which is one of those side benefits of the covid and a lot of people working from home because you can take five minutes to run outside ventilate your windows and make sure that the air flow is in there so the plants don't get too hot now it's a time to plant garlic too so if you have a vegetable garden and you still want to plant garlic plenty of time to do it you can do it now into november without any problem now when you're planting garlic you want to make sure you get the hard neck or the soft neck variety and you want to get varieties that are adapted to our climate like the german red for example or the new york white these are varieties that are adapted to growing here you don't want to just get stuff you get from the grocery store a lot of that comes from california the night before you're ready to plant you want to break apart your bulbs into individual cloves and let that basil plate callus over and that will help with the rooting of it so in the fall when you're planting it you have a raised bed you want to make sure the soil is raised up well because that's the only thing that will kill garlic because if you have really wet cold soil it's not well drained well drained soil is important for them make a row or make an area and just plant them about six inches apart a couple inches deep you need to remember though each one of those cloves is going to form a bulb that has six to eight cloves next year so if you plant 40 40 cloves of garlic now you're going to have 40 bulbs next year or if you do the math 40 times six is 240 cloves to eat that's a lot of garlic if you're Italian like me that's not but if you don't want to have too much garlic make sure you understand how it all works garlic will overwinter pretty well especially if you can put them in a cool place with clay pots turned upside down over the top of them the last longer but even they will dry out come spring so you may end up losing some of that garlic then the only other thing you need to do with your garlic is cover it over and I usually wait till november sometime and I put down some hay mulch or chopped leaves or straw over the top of them maybe about a six to eight inch layer and in this case I put some velcro straps with some boards just to keep it in place so it didn't blow away but then you just leave it there and if you wait till like november or december to cover them before the ground freezes that's good because the mison bowls have found homes all their places and they won't be in your garlic patch they won't eat the garlic but they'll tunnel around they might upset the root system and then in spring you'll just have your garlic coming up they add some water some fertilizer and by july you got fresh garlic then you want to save the biggest bulbs to plant for next year and that way each year you get bigger and bigger bulbs kind of a fun thing to do with garlic there are some herbs and plants you might want to bring indoors this time of year and you can do that and enjoy them chives is probably one of the easiest ones if you have a chive plant out in the container outside start transitioning it indoors if you have a chive part plant in the ground you can even divide it a little bit put it in a pot again give it a week or so outside in a protected spot to get adjusted to the pot then move it inside parsley is nice to move inside if you already have it growing in a container because it'll stay green right up through the holidays it'll eventually form a flower and die in the winter but you can definitely get it to use it for the holidays for cooking it's a nice one to grow it doesn't require a lot of bright light chives and parsley will do well as a window sill or pretty much all season long and Mediterranean herbs like oregano and like thyme these are good ones to have if you have them in the garden they will over winter in the ground but you can also move small plants indoors and they will keep growing a little bit this fall then they'll kind of go dormant but they will start up again February and March when the days start getting longer and that's when you can enjoy them and use them in cooking and then of course you can move them back outside next year and of course the one everyone tries to overwinter is rosemary rosemary in a container is a beautiful plant a nice one to have indoors has a great fragrance to it but you have to be careful about how to over winter it so you want to move it into a very sunny window a bay window or a little kind of a sun room area needs a lot of bright light you want to give it good spacing with from other plants that gets good air circulation and you want to water it but don't keep it too wet this is true with all the Mediterranean herbs like oregano and thyme and rosemary you water it so it's kind of stays on the dry side but not totally dry but just on the dry side you can do that it should make it through the winter so you can move it back outside next year now there's some flowers that people love to try to bring inside one of them is these flowers they're called dipladena or mandavillas black-eyed susan or thunbergia is another vine people like to do they're beautiful this time of year because they bloom so late and people you know you gardeners naturally just want to have them for next year so they they try to bring them inside they cut them back they bring them inside some of these are just not worth doing you know some of them likely mandavillas and the thunbergias this will never they'll over winter inside unless you have a sunny greenhouse kind of environment they're really not going to thrive very much and i have a friend who's done this and he said yeah the plant survived and i put it back out in may and june then it took a whole month or so just to recover from just being really pushed back by the winter and eventually it flowered but it was late like september october i think for these kind of plants it's better just to buy them every year support your local growers and not really try to struggle to try to get them to over winter but there are plants that are easy to over winter like coleus like geraniums like fuchsia like begonias all of those over winter really well and a sunny window indoors the way i do it is that instead of taking the whole plant and over wintering it especially if you have a big one i take a cutting so this coleus here it's called big red judy and i took a cutting of it about a month ago and there's my cutting in the window it's it's rooted it's doing fine it's going to hang out there probably won't grow much for a bunch of months eventually start growing get a little leggy just cut it back remember all i wanted to do is survive and then next year i've got this plant to put back out into the garden when i like to do it not having to wait for the plants to get to the garden center so hopefully this has given you some of the ideas of for what to do this late in the season this late in fall for protecting plants in the winter for moving plants around for cutting things back and for planting i didn't talk about cover crops specifically because it's really kind of late to do it if you're doing it in a vegetable garden you probably could get away with still planting winter wheat and winter rye this late in the season because that will germinate pretty pretty well in cold temperatures but most of the other cover crops that we grow grow it's just not going to germinate very fast so in a vegetable garden uh you have two different options of ways to doing it so normally you would use the cover crops like by september or so you'd be planting them and if you're looking for something that's going to over winter and then be there in the spring that you're going to have to cut back and turn under the winter wheat the winter rye hardy vetch or harry vetch are all really good crops to grow that adds a lot of organic matter and helps really build the soil but if you have raised beds or if you don't want to be turning the soil what i usually recommend and what i've been doing more is planting cover crops in september that will naturally die off in the winter so this could be annual ryegrass field peas all of those will grow fine right up until maybe december or so and then by january february they'll die back but they'll die back and they'll still hold the soil they'll still protect the soil the nice thing is that in the spring you don't have to be turning them under all you do is come in with a layer of compost plant right through them and you have a beautiful garden so if you're looking to do some cover cropping this late in the season you can still do it with the winter rye and winter wheat but usually it's more of a september thing let's see and susan has a question any suggestions for ridding your yard of moles and bowls yes for sure so as i was mentioning with the planting the bulbs using the castor oil is really effective for moles bowls and chipmunks and mice too so you just sprinkle the castor oil you buy it as a pelleted form at a garden center and you sprinkle it around your lawn area around your garden area in the holes where you're planting things any of those places where they're active and they'll get really agitated then they take off and they're all done so that works pretty well and i think that would be the safest way to actually protect your garden from those little rodents let's see linda has a question any issue with fruit flies or other insects if you bring in plants suggestions yes so fruit flies isn't really an issue that's more if you have fruit like tomatoes for example we're always shooing away the fruit flies from our tomatoes that we're continuing to ripen indoors because they come in with the fruits but when you're trying to bring plants indoors you do have to watch out for any hitchhiking insects these could be aphids it could be mealybugs could be scale that could be a bunch of things it could be the eggs of the aphids or eggs of these insects that make it inside and then they hatch with the warm temperatures so what i usually suggest is that when you bring that plant indoors quarantine it put it in its own little section away from your house plants away from other plants that you might have and at that point just leave it there and just watch it watch it for a couple weeks or so and as things develop then you can take that plant and on a warm day you can go outside and you can spray them in insecticidal soap or neem oil whatever it is and then bring them back inside you might have to do that a couple times and i would wait maybe a two or three week period keeping them in quarantine after that by then if there's any insects they probably would have shown themselves by then then you can move them in with the other plants so that's a good question though about what to do with those plants okay well thank you again then for coming i appreciate it as megan mentioned this will be available on the hands website and thank you again for hands for sponsoring me to do this all summer in fall so sweet and it's really nice and i'm glad to do that and it'll be on cctv so i'm sure megan will let you know when that's happening when the air times will be yes once it gets edited it'll be on it'll run on channel 17 periodically which is really nice for folks who don't have internet access and then it will also be on cctv and hands websites so thank you so much we really appreciate it all these tips thank you very much for having me megan so everyone have a great fall great winter and we'll be back in the spring and i'll be seeing you in the garden be careful thanks everybody bye bye