On Monday, October 3rd, Sunnybank closes for the season. Here are some of the first tasks I’ll tackle.
By mid-winter, ravenous rodents and rabbits will dine on the lower bark of young trees and shrubs, killing the hapless plants. So I’ll securely wrap tender trunks to two feet up with plastic coil, or a paper-like tree wrap. (I forgot one year, and lost a wonderful viburnum.)
Weed-yanking continues: happily the offenders, forced to root in my nutrient-rich cocoa shell mulch, can’t find a firm foothold. Plucking them out is easy.
Worms, by the way, find it delectable. Who’dathunk?
Bare spots, exposed after pulling exhausted annuals, need mulch, so I’ll thoroughly water, lay an inch, then immediately water again on a ‘mist’ setting to lock the shells together. (Mulch-blankets shouldn’t have gaping holes.)
My roses love living in the alley: the southern sun roasts them all day, while their mulched roots are constantly bathed in moisture from my hard-working drip line.
Though still producing lovely last blooms, they’re beginning to nod off. Good. To encourage hibernation I stopped pruning and deadheading on September 1st. (Trying to produce more buds this late would certainly weaken them if they were caught not napping, and winter came early.) Though they do look frowzy I’ll wait until we experience a hard freeze to shorten some very long canes. How is ‘hard’ defined? Put simply, if the earth is unyielding when I poke it firmly, tidying is safe.
Except for eliminating dead stems, I won’t prune my old-wood hydrangeas, which would remove all the (clearly visible) buds. I’d have lush foliage, but no flowers next year. Right now I’ll keep things simple and do nothing except keep their nether regions mulched and moistened. (In the wild they did just fine without being fiddled with. There’ll be more about that in spring.)
Remember: those first five letters are H Y D R A.
It’s hard to water a hydrangea too much.
Hostas are taken down, right to the earth. They’ll turn to mush if I don’t.
By the way, most of my plants are rated for zone 4, one zone lower than we who live near the lake usually experience, so their chances for survival are greater when nature occasionally goes nuts and drops the temperature precipitously. Early snowfalls really help: under that blanket it’s just 32 degrees.
Overhead, winter winds desiccate plants, especially shrubs. Young evergreens, insufficiently hydrated in fall by owners or by rain, die of thirst. So I’ll soak the earth, mulch, then water, water, water as late as I dare, before finally blowing the pipes. They’ll appreciate every drop.
I’ll loosely encircle each columnar evergreen with thick green twine, which prevents splitting in heavy winter snows, and then pound 6’ tall metal stakes next to each one for extra, nearly invisible support. Twined loosely to these ‘backbones,’ they’ll remain upright in heavy snows.
I began this column mentioning familiar creatures dining on interesting food - worms eating chocolate, rabbits dining on juvenile tree bark - and I’ll end it, just for fun, with a fascinating people-to-piggy tidbit that made me squeal.
The British dine on pork bellies, ox cheeks, jellied calves feet, and now—
pig’s trotters! are enjoying a huge culinary revival in Great Britain, and here in America as well, as meat prices go stratospheric. One posh chef, after touting their high collagen content as being beneficial for aging skin, reports that 500 pairs of these dubious delectables have trotted into his patrons’ tummies in less than a week, instead of the more usual month.
Huh. Though usually adventurous, I’d have to be rabbit-desperate to eat feet.