Lots of hard work, Rita. Know you are glad that is done. Your daylilies look like ours, still pretty green, so you have been having mild weather. We had a hard freeze last night, down to 26 degrees, lots of frost, but so far most of the daylilies aren't showing much sign of going down, even the dormants. Avedon

I think I put on more leaves in the gardenbeds here this year than I ever have before. I am lucky the weather held to be so nice. We have had some days chillier with rain but mostly mild for this time of year. Plus the rain pushes down the leaves and keeps them from blowing around much so that is actually good.

Last Fall I did hardly any fall mulching and this year I was determined to get things done right before winter set in. But the dayllies are still very green this year. They just don't seem to want to go down for the winter.

You have lots of oaks.

Looks good! Rita, do you grind up the leaves first or just put the entire leaf down? I didn't think the leaves broke down well last year when I put the leaves down w/o grinding them up. This tempts me to want to empty some of those 20 bags of leaves I've collected this week in the garden. Know you're glad to have put your garden to sleep for the winter.

I just dump the leaves as is and never shred them up. I have been doing it this way for years and years and years. I do have mostly oak leaves in that mix although there are other sorts mixed in also. These leaves didn't just come from my property, no way would I have enough to do more than one gardenbed. I just collect the bagged fall leaves from my immediate neighborhood around here and dump them in my garden.

The one exception to the no shredding is if I mulch the southside rose bed in the fall. I have to use shredded leaves as I can get the leaves much more on the ground and not lying on the canes of the roses. I could not find any shreaded ones this year so the only bed not done this fall is that Southside rose bed. I plan on getting the black hardwood mulch they sell and using that on the roses come spring. Right now they have some mostly broken down straw but it really looks horrible.

Just makes ya feel good inside knowing you have so much work complete. Your beds look great with all the new mulch on them. When you say snapdragon, do you have one that is a perennial? I have planted the annuals before but have never heard of a perennial one. Judy

No, I just call it the snapdragon bed as I planted snapdragons between the daylilies in there this spring. They are annuals and I pulled them all out to finish up the mulching. Have to replant them each year anyway.

Looking really nice,RITA, so do you rake all them leaves back out of there when sping comes?

Jean

You must not get that much wind there. It's very windy here, and whole leaves blow around. I have to shred the leaves first or they don't stay in the garden. Been there, done that.

Your soil is going to have some very happy worms come spring!

Deanna

"Looks good! Rita, do you grind up the leaves first or just put the entire leaf down? I didn't think the leaves broke down well last year when I put the leaves down w/o grinding them up. This tempts me to want to empty some of those 20 bags of leaves I've collected this week in the garden. Know you're glad to have put your garden to sleep for the winter."

"I just dump the leaves as is and never shred them up. I have been doing it this way for years and years and years. I do have mostly oak leaves in that mix although there are other sorts mixed in also."

Shredding vs. no shredding may depend on the types of leaves you're using as mulch. Some people in a hosta discussion group I belong to have stated that unshredded maple leaves break down so slowly that they create a mat of leaves, with anaerobic conditions able to form under the mat. I don't know whether that is always true, sometimes true, or not true, but I can say that, last spring, I was still scooping up mats of completely intact maple leaves from the edges of some beds.

At our previous house, there were many maple leaves from a neighbor's trees and, over the years, I simply left them to pile up in one portion of one bed. In the end, what was left was amazingly dark and crumbly completely broken down leaf mold. But it took some years to reach that state.

....A long way of saying, if you have primarily maple leaves for your beds, my advice would be to be conservative and use them only if shredded. If anyone else has a different take on the matter, please tell...I'm all ears. As it were. ;)

No big batches of maple leaves here so I really don't ever concern myself with matting. I have been mulching like this with the unshredded leaves just as they are collected for years and years and years. They don't mat up. Besides the earthworms are very happy here and the leaf mulch ends up full of earthworms which of course helps break down the mulch.

It is not much windy here but of course there is always some blowing around of the leaves. Not enough to be a problem though. As soon as they get rained on, that helps keep them in place also as the rain gets them settled down. It is raining today so that is good for the settling of the leaves.

Jean, Heck no I don't rake them up. Why in the world would I do that? They are there as mulch for the garden so that weeds don't grow in the gardenbeds and so that the soil holds as much moisture in as possible. The ground in my gardens is soft and easy to dig in, never cacked and hard or crusted.

Looks good Rita. I was wondering if I would need to pull back the pine needles away from daylilies in the spring, but sounds like I won't need to.

I don't use whole leaves either. Everything gets shredded even the dead scapes LOL.

The only thing I ever heard about why not to use whole leaves is slugs. They like to live under the wet mats of leaves. Not sure if that is true either.

Julia

Julia, one could undoubtedly add that whole leaves are vole havens as well. All those piles of brown leaves enable them to hide from predators. Of course, so, too, do the chopped up ones.

For me, it's now a trade off between mulch, especially leaves that will break down over time and enrich the soil, and another nowhere-to-hide procedure put in place here. A garden columnist for a local paper counseled against over-deep mulches and too many perennials and grasses left over the winter because voles can hide in them. OTOH, I now have Kitty, a semi-feral who has adopted me, and who is an extraordinary hunter. She's brought as many as three voles per day to the patio. That's a good thing, except that it means there are easily 3 to some exponential power of them in the garden. :(

For now, I've decided to cut down dead scapes, asters stems, etc. but also to mulch. Depending on how many plants I lose this year, I may have to change that.

I do have slugs and snails. All the heavy mulch is slug heaven. I just use sluggo at various times during the spring and summer.

Stomped, stomped, stomped. That's what my DLs and iris next to the house look like right now, because the contractors doing our siding don't seem to care where they step. They also crushed a bunch of seedlings, which is bizarre since they're next to a shed away from the house. Almost like they decided to stomp them on purpose! I'm sure the adult plants will come back, but the seedlings may be in trouble.

Nate

Rita everything looks great you have been very busy. I can't wait for spring to see your garden in bloom again.
Linda

Nate, it sounds like the following is too late, since your work has already begun, but for what it's worth:

We had 4 new roofs (entire house) and everything that that entailed (remove old roofs, put on new + gutters & downspouts) and new stucco siding on one side of the house's addition (hence, remove all old stucco, too). Contractor also created a new profile for the eave over that side of the house; also made and installed a copper overhang for the window on that side. Not all of this was done at the same time; still, a lot of construction materials and debris. Used the same contractor and his small crew for everything.

The crew was able to do the roofing job by accessing all the roofs from the patio; the main issue was roof debris that ended up on the ground. They were exceedingly careful and neat but even now, I do find the occasional nail and bits of roofing material.

For the stucco work, however, they needed to erect and safely access scaffolding. I asked the contractor to try to protect a daylily bed directly under the side of the house needing that work. For various reasons, I couldn't dig up the plants in it, even though it contained some daylilies I value a lot (eg LAST SNOWFLAKE, NEON FLAMINGO, COWBOY SCARF, MABOU, Jack Carpenter patterns, and more), so he set up the scaffolding on a large piece of plywood that was placed on cinder blocks on either end of the bed (and with two blocks supporting the mid part of the wood).

The crew had to access the scaffolding of course, so one end of the bed got badly trampled & the soil very compacted. Even so, given what had to be done to the house, and the time they spent doing it, the daylilies sailed through everything in near perfect condition. There was a lot of bent and torn foliage, but it was late autumn anyway so that didn't matter. Plus, it was the crowns I'd been concerned about.

We plan to use the same guys to paint the house's exterior next spring. Since I don't know exactly which month that will be, I expect to have to dig up the entire bed. Even so, I'll ask the contractor to once again place scaffolding on plywood on cinder blocks. The idea will be to protect the soil from compaction so that I can use that bed again as soon as the work is done.

That's a good idea. The biggest problem here was that we can't be home during the daytime when the contractors are working, so I didn't realize where they'd be stomping until they'd already been working for a full day.

Most of the plants they're stomping are low-value plants in the back yard next to the house, and I'm sure those will come back just fine (good point about soil compacting though).

I just don't understand how the seedling bed ended up in their path, but I guess they didn't realize those scrawny little plants were important. They're doing much better at avoiding stuff in the front garden, where it's obvious that the plants are "real" garden plants.

Nate

Your gardens look great, and you must have great soil,
I use leaves too, and they are shredded, but only because that is the easy way for me to pick them up, as I have a leaf vaccum that sucks them up and shreds, and then I just have to dump them. Sometimes I store the leaves in bags until we have killing frosts, and then I spread them out . Our fall has been mild, and I plan on spreading out the last bag of leaves tomorrow.
cindy

Everything looks really good, Rita. I still need to do a lot of weeding, and removing leaves from the iris beds, but I am in no hurry to do that right now.
kay

Kay, I had been wondering were you wandered off too. My garden work for the year is done. If I haven't already gotten it done by now then it is just gonna wait until next spring.

Well, I will get out a bit on warmer days. WE are likely to have a few of those yet. If I don't get out and work in the iris beds some, I will be dealing with rot. The daylilies are showing the effects of freezes, so they need to be cleaned up a bit...I won't be doing a lot until Christmas is past though, since I love to bake and make candy to hand out.

kay