This thread started out as an addendum to comments I had written in answer to comments by Kaylah on another thread, but it took off in a different direction, so I thought I had better give it a thread of its own.

Fall is a great time to work in the garden. As my sister said when we were talking about it recently, this is the season when you can clean up faster than the garden can get messy again. Ha. Also, for my husband and me this is the big planting and propagating season, since our winters are long, dark, wet, and relatively mild. The plants have plenty of time to get established or to root before the summer heat and drought arrive.

I've been thinking about weeds lately, and their genteel relatives, annual flowers. I mean annual weeds, not scourges like Bermuda grass and bindweed. As I've written before, our soil is like pottery clay, as dense and compact as you could ask for; and we've been mulching heavily with hay for years in order to keep the soil cool and water retentive in summer, smother weeds, and add nutrients and organic matter to the soil. In large part this works and the soil improves over time, though it seems to take about five years for changes for the better to make themselves felt. But there are problems. A heavy mulch can actually prevent rain from penetrating the ground, so that it remains dry and cracked even after considerable rainfall; and while mulch will keep down many weeds, bindweed can penetrate any organic mulch ever made.

Our sunny garden is located in a former grass field, which in spring and fall was dominated by annual grasses (weeds and patches of Bermuda grass reigned in summer). I've tried to discourage the grass in the beds, but the annual grasses escape me and grow vigorously in some areas of the garden, and I've begun to realize that this may not be such a bad thing. Herbaceous annuals provide a lot of benefits. They produce organic matter on site, so that you don't have to purchase it and haul it in with tractors. Their roots penetrate the ground, holding it in place and remaining as organic enrichment in the ground (no digging in) once the plant has died. They cool the ground and freshen the air. Our sunny garden is completely open to sun and to wind, both of them abundant and powerful, and my impression is that the roses and other shrubs are much happier in the company of other plants that help protect them.

Of course weeds are ugly: that's a major reason they're weeds. But I like my lush tangle of old and species roses, shrubs, annual grasses and herbaceous plants that grows in the bottom of the garden. When the native self-seeded annuals, poppies, annual spurges, dead nettles, wild peas, get too ratty, I pull them or cut them to the ground. The plug-uglies are pulled and tossed aside immediately. Meanwhile I continue to plant and seed garden plants and attractive natives that will do the work of the weeds, growing, self-seeding, or resprouting in spring from perennial roots. I make a space among the wild grasses and plant my foxgloves, nigella, asters, violets, or whatever the case may be, hoping that they'll become permanent members of the garden.

Melissa