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"?