Wildlife-Friendly Fall Garden Clean-Up

You’ve probably seen social media posts asking gardeners to avoid raking leaves or tidying their gardens to protect beneficial insects, and they are true. Removing plant material can destroy the shelter and food sources for many of our garden visitors, but it’s also important to strike a balance. Tidying can help reduce disease issues and prepare your garden for next spring. Here’s how you can give your garden a fall tidy while still protecting songbirds, pollinators, fireflies, and other wildlife.

dead leaves (attract beneficial insects)
Dead leaves are excellent habitat for many beneficial insects.

Leave the Leaves

You’ve probably heard it, and it is important. Fall leaves are a key habitat for beneficial insects and add organic matter to the soil as they break down. 

If you want to remove the leaves from your lawn, consider just moving them into the garden, around perennials, or on garden pathways. There they can still provide some habitat and act as a mulch. They’ll protect beneficial insects in the garden, insulate the soil, and add nutrients and organic matter to the soil as they slowly decay.  

Leaves also make excellent additions to the compost pile.

Reduce Your Mowing

Leaving your grass a little long in the fall can also help wildlife. The pupae of some fireflies, butterflies, and moths will overwinter in the soil beneath a nice thick thatch of long grass. If you want fireflies to light up the lawn next spring, leave it long this fall!

You can discontinue mowing a bit early or set the mower to its highest setting for the final cut. It’s good for your lawn too! Leaving grass a bit longer helps protect the soil and can create a healthier, lusher lawn next season. Stem with butterfly chrysalis

Leave Flower Stems

It may not look tidy, but dead stalks bring their own beauty to the winter garden. Flowers like sunflowers, Joe-Pye weed, goldenrod, tithonia, rudbeckia (black-eyed Susans), and marigolds will all attract seed-eating songbirds to your winter garden. Leaving the stalks will also help them self-sow and spread. Songbirds are messy eaters! They will drop some seeds as they eat and spread others through their droppings. Think of it as low-effort seed-bombing.

The stalks also provide a winter safe-haven for pollinators and other beneficial insects. Butterflies may pupate hanging from dense clumps of plant material. Small native bees like leaf-cutter bees, mason bees, and carpenter bees will also overwinter in hollow flower stems. 

However, not all perennial flowers thrive without cutting back. If you notice pest or disease issues throughout the summer or have flowers like peonies, bearded irises, or bee balm that are prone to fungal issues like powdery mildew, you should still trim them in the autumn. A orange pumpkin on a dead vine with tomatoes in the background

Remove Vegetable Crop Material

We also recommend that you remove all vegetable crop material. Old squash and cucumber vines can harbor diseases like powdery mildew, tomatoes carry diseases like late blight, and asparagus stalks can harbor asparagus beetles. We like to burn any diseased or pest-ridden vegetable material before winter to help mitigate these issues. 

Doing a final round of weeding can also help you get a head start on spring. Many cool-weather weeds germinate in the fall, stay small all winter, and then take off in the spring right when you’re trying to get crops into the ground. 

Sow Cover Crops or Add Mulch

Don’t leave your soil bare. After removing vegetable crops and weeds, you want to place a protective covering over the soil for winter. This will insulate the soil, protect against erosion, and provide critical habitat for beneficial insects and fungi.

Fall-planted cover crops are great for this. You can sow nitrogen fixers like clover and Austrian winter peas, daikon radishes to help bust hardpan and loosen the soil, or winter wheat or rye to help build up organic matter. 

If you don’t have the time or energy to plant a cover crop, mulch is a suitable alternative. You can cover the soil with leaves, grass clippings, straw, wood chips, or other natural materials that will break down over the winter. Honeybee on a cluster of ironweed

Fall Plant Native Flowers & Perennials

Once you have a tidy garden, you can also do some fall planting for wildlife. We carry a few flowers suitable for fall planting.

One of our favorite native plant and seed organizations, Prairie Moon Nursery, offers a wide selection of native plants for fall planting that ship in September and October, like wild leeks (ramps), rose milkweed, false indigo, Culver’s root,  and common ironweed that are perfect for attracting and supporting wildlife. They also offer native seeds and seed mixes depending on your needs.

You can also fall plant native trees and shrubs. The Arbor Day Foundation is a great place to get affordable native species like eastern redbud, eastern red cedar, hackberry, and American elder. 

Growing a mix of native plants that offer a range of heights, textures, fruit, flowers, and growth styles will provide habitat for songbirds, pollinators, and other wildlife for years to come. 

Winter Spinach Production

In the Southeast, it’s tough to grow cold-loving, heat-sensitive crops like spinach during the spring. Too quickly, the spring showers give way to summer heat and humidity, and the spinach bolts. Thankfully, we can enjoy spinach right through the winter with a bit of care. These tips will help you grow winter spinach like a pro.

Why Grow Winter Spinach?

Spinach grown in frosty weather has the largest and sweetest leaves. Plus, winter-grown spinach is low maintenance. Once it’s established, you won’t have much to do besides occasionally harvest.

Beaujolais Spinach
Beaujolais Spinach

Spinach Varieties for Winter Production

Most true spinach varieties are pretty cold hardy, and we carry a few that are suited to winter production.

Longstanding and Winter Bloomsdale are both great options for overwintering even in cooler climates, withstanding winter lows down to 0°F.

When to Start Winter Spinach

High summer temperatures can prevent germination or kill young spinach seedlings, so in the southeast it’s often ideal to wait a month before you’re first expected frost. 

That said, in cool or mountainous areas, you want to make sure the plants are well established before winter lows halt their growth. When the day length reaches 10 hours per day or fewer, growth is significantly reduced.

Abundant Bloomsdale Spinach (winter spinach)
Abundant Bloomsdale Spinach

How to Start Winter Spinach

Especially in the Southeast, getting winter spinach started in the late summer or fall while temperatures are still hot can be a major challenge. To ensure good germination and seedling growth, you need to keep the soil as cool as possible.

Irrigate often to keep the soil cool and moist. Irrigating with cool water will bring down the soil temperature. It will further decrease as moisture evaporates and draws heat from the soil.

When irrigating frequently, be careful not to make the soil soggy and monitor closely for signs of dampening off. 

If your spinach is in an open bed in fall, sow seed 2-3 times as thick to help the spinach survive grasshoppers.

Maintaining Spinach Through Winter

While some spinach varieties can tolerate temperatures down to 0°F and even getting snowed on, it is best to give them a bit of protection if possible. You can overwinter spinach in a cold frame, low tunnel, or high tunnel.

In the mountains or more northern areas, you can use a combination to help protect spinach more. Plant spinach in a high tunnel, then as the temperatures drop, cover it with frost cloth or low tunnels. 

While growth will slow and eventually halt in the fall or winter, you can still harvest some spinach leaves in the winter. As the day length increases again in February, you will see growth resume. Overwintered spinach makes for an excellent early crop in spring. 

In warmer temperatures, remember to remove or vent your coverings to ensure the spinach doesn’t get too hot. 

Harvesting and Storing Peppers

In August, peppers dot the garden like holiday lights. We’re harvesting large sweet bell peppers like Charleston Belles, fiery little hot peppers like Serrano Tampiqueños, and fragrant spice peppers like Trinidad Perfumes. Whatever peppers you’ve grown this year, knowing how to harvest, store, and process your crop will help you make the most out of your peppers. 

When to Harvest Peppers

You can harvest peppers at any color stage, but they aren’t fully ripe until they reach their mature color. Waiting until they are fully ripe increases flavor and nearly doubles the vitamin C content. 

Exactly what color your peppers ripen to depends on the variety. For example. Chiclayo Hot Peppers ripen from light green to light orange while Purple Beauty Sweet Bell Peppers ripen from green to purple to deep red. 

Especially for larger peppers, you may want to use shears or scissors to harvest the peppers. Tugging the fruits off by hand may damage your plant.

Chiclayo Hot Peppers
Chiclayo Hot Peppers

Extending the Harvest

Usually, mature pepper plants are still thriving when fall weather comes to Virginia. To extend our harvest, we cover the plants each night in old sheets or frost cloth during our first one to two weeks of light frosts. 

Then, before the first killing frost, we uproot plants and place the roots in a bucket of water and store in a cool location to extend harvest by one month. 

For fresh use late into the fall, we also like to grow Doe Hill Golden Sweet Bell Peppers. Their fruits keep well.

Storing Peppers

How you process and store your peppers will depend on the variety and what you have planned. 

Fresh Eating

Store any peppers you want to eat fresh in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator. This is also a great place for peppers your waiting to process for canning or freezing. Pickled Peppers

Canning

Peppers are a low acid vegetable, which means to safely can them, you must pressure can them or make incorporate them into an acidic recipe for water bath canning like salsa, hot sauce, or pickled peppers. Always used tested canning recipes from trusted sources. 

Here are a few tested recipes:

Freezing

Peppers are easy to freeze, you can freeze them raw or roast or blanch them first if you want to use them for cooking later in the season.

Here’s how to freeze peppers.

Drying

Drying or dehydrating peppers is a great way to store them. You can dry hot or spice peppers to be ground up for seasoning, or chunks of peppers to rehydrate and cook in soups, sauces, and casseroles. 

Unfortunately, it’s usually too humid to air dry most peppers in the Southeastern United States. For most large peppers, it’s best to use a food dehydrator or dry them in the oven. You need an oven or dehydrator that you can set to 140°F. Higher temperatures will cook the peppers rather than dry them. 

Learn to dry peppers in the oven here.

For some small peppers, you can use thread and needle to sting them for air drying. Typically, this works best if you can hang the strings somewhere hot and dry. An attic, loft, car port, or garden shed may work well.

Saving the Past for the Future