October is the busiest month in the garden second to spring planting.
This is when not only are we finishing up the harvest in our vegetable gardens, but we are working on clean up and preparation for spring.
October is our last chance to bring in those tender perennials we want to save indoors. It is possible you have already brought the house plants inside. Cooler night temperatures, especially if there are several cool nights in a row, can take a toll on tender tropicals. But other plants that can take a bit of cold weather, although they would suffer under heavy frosts, also should come inside now. Some of these might include rosemary from the herb garden or geraniums from the flower border.
Begin by clearing weeds and debris from the trunks of trees, fruit trees and other shrubs. Keeping that area clean can help keep rodents and other small animals from living in the debris where they have easy access to the bark at the base of the trees. To protect tender trees from rodent damage, small collars made of hardware cloth or chicken wire at the base of the tree trunk near the soil line can discourage damage as well.
While you're tending to trees, be sure to continue to water conifers, particularly new plantings and other shrubs that have been in the ground less than three years. One of the main reasons shrubs and conifers don't make it through the winter is because their roots start the cold season without enough moisture to get them through the winter. If your conifers, particular white pine, show some needle browning between now and our later hard frosts, it doesn't mean the plant is dying. Needle drop is common among many varieties, with some losing older, inside growth each year.
You may already have ordered your spring flowering bulbs, but those bins inside the entrances to hardware and discount department stores are difficult to resist as well. Planting bulbs is probably the least liked, yet most rewarding part of fall gardening. It can be a good deal of work, mainly because the best results come from planting numerous amounts. Lining up tulips and daffodils like soldiers is not appealing, but mass plantings throughout the garden bed will create the best dramatic effects in spring when we are needing those bursts of color the most.
Most people struggle over how deep to plant their bulbs. The rule of thumb is four times the size of the bulb, so if your tulip is a huge four inches in diameter, you can feel secure going a foot down. In actuality, it is difficult to plant these bulbs too deep. Daffodils and tulips have been known to grow through straw bales that were inadvertently left in a garden throughout the winter.
Smaller bulbs, such as crocus (which are not true bulbs, but are corms), grape hyacinth (muscari), miniature iris, scilla and glory of the snow (chionodoxa), can be planted three to four inches deep in well-amended soil.
One of my favorite late spring flowers, allium, are temperamental in my garden. I never know what plants will return from one year to the next. Some only come back every two years. So to keep a steady supply of allium blooming, I plant new varieties each year.
Being such a busy month, the work involved in getting through it is too much to cover at once, so I will be touching on this month's chores throughout the month.
With a plan and a little steady progress, by the time we start to shovel snow, the gardens will be pristine and simply waiting for spring.