Why I Oughta...

'Tis the season for the start of garden cleanup.  Well...it is probably too early to do MOST of the cleanup, but I did start with a few 'chop and drop' experiments. First, I cleaned up a couple of Autumn Moor Grasses in the new front porch bed extension .  Then, I moved on to the raised vegetable bed on our back patio .   The most recent little slice of the garden that I started clean-up on was hinted in this post showing the tulip tips from earlier this week .  Those tulips are down near the sidewalk in the IB2DWs (extended) bed.  That's also where we have (now) two Panicum grasses ( I divided one that was struggling last Fall ) and the 'mystery' blue-ish Moor Grass that I moved out from the front porch bed .  I clipped off the grasses at the ground and cut them up into smaller pieces.  And, like the other areas of the garden, I left them in place to provide a light mulch layer.  See below for a couple of photos showing this area:  Thi...

Yesterday, I posted some photos and details of the very early 'chop-and-drop' that I did with a couple of the Autumn Moor Grasses in the new front porch bed extension.  I found a little bit of time in the early evenings this week to try a little bit of clean-up.  I wanted to get it started now because I wanted the time for that newly, mulched material to begin to decompose.   While I didn't finish the ornamental grasses in front (yet), I also moved on to a different spot:  the raised vegetable bed on our back patio.  Just like the grasses, this bed had some stems and seed heads that I left behind from last season's plants.  Tomato bushes.  Herb stems.   I took my pruners to those and cut them up into small segments.  And left them on the top of the bed.  You can see the 'chopped' mulch in the two photos below.  I typically top this bed with a couple of bags of compost and/or mushroom compost, so this plant litter will get...

I've used biosolids (municipal biosolids from Downers Grove) in various ways over the years on our property - topdressing of my lawn in spots, as an amendment and accelerant in our compost bins , as a vertical mulch to try to improve the soil/clay conditions in my front porch bed (along with leaf litter) , as a soil/perennial bed amendment with stump grindings to attempt to balance the nitrogen loss , as a little boost when planting new shrubs like the SnowQueen Oakleaf Hydrangeas and most recently as both soil cover and hole-filler in the newly extended IB2DWS bed area with my new dwarf conifer garden and new (to me) flowers.   This year, I'm going to be using them in a few (new to me) additional ways:  first, as a dormant application on top of my beds.  This Fall, I blew most of the leaves out of my beds and chopped them up with the mower.   I then blew some of those chopped leaves back into the beds and left plenty of small pieces in the lawn.   T...

The planting bed that is out front of our porch has been something that has been on my mind for years.  Specifically...the growing conditions.  Between a few things going on out there, I think it might be time (this year) to take an even more aggressive stance at improving the soil across this foundation planting bed.  Last year (2022), one of the items on my annual to-do list was to think about how we improve the conditions up there and I suppose that I did that (a little) and gave myself a partial grade of complete.   The way I was thinking about this problem was across a couple of fronts:  hydrophobic mulch and the root mat from the Norway Maple .   Starting last Spring, I went about trying to fix the hydrophobic mulch issue - including the addition of some nitrogen in the form of alfalfa cubes and raked it in .  Then, in the Fall, I attempted to do even more.  First...with the removal and grinding of the Norway Maple tree, I'm hopin...