Chop and Drop Autumn Moor Grass In Front Porch Bed - Winter Clean-up - February 2025

This week we're facing our largest snow storm of the season with anywhere from four-to-twelve inches of snow forecast to fall in our neighborhood.  But, the past few days, the late afternoon temperatures have hovered in the upper thirties - which feels like a balmy, Spring day to me right now.  Because of that - and some pushing from this post from Dr. Jared Barnes where he showed he was getting a start on his annual garden clean-up - I decided to go out and try a few things in the garden.

I grabbed a pair of gloves and some pruners and walked into the front yard.  I opted to start with a couple of the Seslaria Autumnalis (Autumn Moor Grass) that are planted in the front porch bed.  Now...I normally wait until a bit later in Winter to begin clean-up.  Everyone says to...'let it lay' until the harshest part of Winter has passed.  Leave the leaf litter and stems to protect the plant crowns from cold.  

And that's what I've done - for the most part.  But...I got a little bit of the itch and decided to attack some of the standing dead material/stems/seed-heads.  Why now?  Because, I'm looking to take advante of TIME.  Yes...time.

Last Fall (October), I expanded the front porch bed outwards into the lawn using the 'lazy bed extension' method.  That calls for leaving the turf in place, but smothering it with cardboard.  And then applying a mix of material on top of the cardboard to create the bed.  In October 2024, I used a mix of municipal biosolids, scratch-made (house) compost and some wood-chip mulch to add about 24" of depth to the front of the bed.  I talked about doing these 'lazy' bed extensions in the Fall because of the notion of using 'time'.  By laying down these beds in October, they'll be *ready* for planting in April or May.  That six or seven month process will kill the turf and make the beds rich with organic material.

In recent years, I've done a mix of things with my Spring clean-up material.  I compost A LOT of it.  But, I also have started to do the "Chop and Drop" method of cutting up the dead plant material and leaving it in the beds - to enrich and amend the soil.  

That's what I decided to do with some of these Autumn Moor Grasses.  And, that's where "time" comes in.  I took my pruners out and started to clip-off the tips of the grasses.  Below you can see the first two in the row that I cleaned up.

And, I proceeded to take the blades and seedheads and cut them up into small segments - between one-and-one-half inches each.  I let all those cut-up blades just fall into the bed as a sort-of mulch.  See below for the thin layer of clippings I created:

With the material from just two grasses, I was able to scatter a thin layer across the full bed extension in front.  See below for the new bed extension covered in clippings:

Here, below, is another look at the bed extension with grass clippings:

I plan on planting these beds out in May.  That means we have (Feb --> March, March --> April and April --> May) about 100 days of TIME to allow for the decomposition of this material.  By then, they'll be MOSTLY gone, I bet.   

I've talked about using leaf mulch over the years and perhaps this year will FINALLY be the year I make it happen.