Don't Rush To Clean Up Your Garden Beds!

 

Toss it away -- or let it sit?

I spent part of this afternoon pulling up dead tomato plants, dumping out the Walls O Water (at this altitude, we use them all season long), and putting away the wire cages.

But should I have done that? There is a good eco-friendly case to made for saving all that work until spring — although the plastic "walls" need to be stored out of the weather.

From the Give a Shit about Nature website — also an account on X.com:

The Fall Cleanup Instinct and Why It’s Worth Questioning

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a tidy garden. The issue is that fall cleanup, when done thoroughly, often wipes out habitat at the exact moment it’s being occupied. The stems that look dead and expendable in October are full of eggs and larvae that have nowhere else to go.

Nebraska Extension notes that when hollow stems are cut and moisture seeps into the open ends, it can kill the eggs, larvae, and pupae of native bees living inside. The stem needs to stay intact and dry through winter for the insects within it to survive. Cutting in fall doesn’t just remove habitat. It can directly kill occupants. . . . 

About 30 percent of native solitary bees nest in cavities above ground, which often means hollow or pithy plant stems. Duke Gardens explains it directly: cutting and removing stalks in fall effectively removes the next generation from the landscape. Species like small carpenter bees, yellow-faced bees, and mason bees lay eggs in dried stems in summer; those eggs overwinter as larvae and emerge the following spring. The stem is their home for the whole winter.

This advice is more about native plants and perennials than annuals like tomatoes.  But it's still worth thinking about. Is "tidy" the enemy of "abundance"?

CSU Using AI to Predict Hail Storms

Colorado hailstones, June 2025.  (9News photo)

I was in Pueblo talking with my new insurance agent yesterday -- new in that her Colorado Springs-based agency (with satellite offices) has bought up my old small-town agency, which earlier had bought a smaller-town agency). Consolidation everywhere — like hailstones,

We talked about trying to get fire etc coverage for our rental cabin, It came up for renewal right during the big Aspen Acres Fire,  and that was a hard no. (The coverage came from a different company arranged through a broker). Bad enough that it is not owner-occupied; now it's too close to the fire.

Yet as her computer told her, the only claims that I have submitted for that house and for my own house were for hail damage! A big storm in 2017 led to roof replacement on both houses in 2018. The cabin already had a metal roof; now it has a newer one.

Fires are scary and can take out many structures in a day, but hail costs Coloradans more:

Hail is the number one factor driving up homeowners insurance rates in Colorado, according to a new analysis released by the state’s Division of Insurance and the Governor’s office.

Wildfire risk accounts for a much lower percentage of premiums on average, according to the data, though wildfire-prone homes in Colorado are often dropped by insurers altogether. 

Insurance premiums in the state are rising faster than the national average and far outpacing inflation, with no clear end in sight. That’s partly because Colorado regularly faces multiple catastrophes, like hail storms and infernos. 

 Now this news from Colorado State University:

Colorado State University researchers will deploy artificial intelligence-assisted weather forecasts in 2027 that could extend warnings of dangerous, destructive hailstorms by hours or possibly days ahead of current modeling. . . .

A cross-discipline team is linking a specialized version of chipmaker NVIDIA’s forecasting, which they dubbed Hail-StormScope, with a previously developed CSU machine-learning model. Using the two together is already proving to increase warning times and update impact areas as storms change. . . .

The new system will draw on older, low-tech tools as well, including CSU climatologist Russ Schumacher’s statewide network of amateur weather observers whose home stations come with a foil-covered styrofoam platform that can register the size of hailstones before they melt.  

Click through for some interesting graphics.