October is the kindest month
It’s time to take down tangled spent vines with crinkled leaves and add them to the pile with tall dead pepper plants. They greeted me on my visits all summer and bore food and flowers, but it’s time to reclaim the ground and air. October is when I clean up the dry withered leftovers from the summer garden. This is a good thing.
Every garden is different, so I can’t tell you what your garden needs, and you probably know more than I do anyway. Nevertheless, this is what I did.
Pathways get cluttered during the season because somebody was too busy to keep them clear. Cosmos plants, now six feet tall and bare, gangle onto the pathway space. Their flowers are gone leaving seed clusters at eye level and easy to collect, but because they self-seed so enthusiastically, there is no need to collect seeds except to give away.
This is the time, however, to collect basil seeds. The stems are bare and woody with seeds in clusters and circles up and down the branches. One way to collect seeds is to snip off the branches with seeds, place them in a paper bag, wait a couple days, shake shake shake, open the bag slowly for fun just to see if it smells like basil, gently squeeze the bag with best intentions, pour contents into a receptacle, separate little black seeds from chaff and stuff.
Folks who pay attention claim basil varieties cross-pollinate easily. I hope so. I planted three new for me varieties (Italy, France, Ghana) side-by-side and all three were productive. Well, along came seed-saving day and the seed-saving patrol deposited seed clumps from the three patches indiscriminately into the same box, so not only might future seedlings be a cross, I might not know what they are regardless… the best of both worlds… doesn’t take much to get me excited.
Also in pathways were morning glory vines. They can be a nuisance. They are talented at slithering and twisting through anything nearby to climb to the top and bear showy flowers. The flowers are a treat. Climbing all over everything leads to conflicts with my agenda, plus every flower must drop thousands of seeds, and that’s my guess just to show I’m impressed.
By this time of year, the vines have long since run down the pathways. It’s like the flowers diverted attention from the chaos until the first frost and there were no more flowers, just vines running down pathways. I like it better now that they have joined the leaf mulch pile.
Bean vines and cucumber vines are better behaved. They usually stay close to home on their trellises. Once the frost removes the foliage, you can see how the intelligence in the bean knows to wind itself around available verticals as it climbs as high as the highest perch. I’ve had Ozark Purple Pod bean vines continue from the top of the trellis onto a nearby peach tree. Removing vines might require pruning shears.
Also waiting for attention are four-feet tall once-healthy pepper plants. Peppers have a healthy root system, but they were ready to come out. I knocked dirt off the roots and snipped the branches into smaller sections so they might break down faster.
As reclamation continued, the visual space changed. With fewer tall things, the air felt calmer. It’s easier to focus on the soil because plants are gone. The soil did its part; it gave what it had, and now it gets some horsey gently mixed in covered by grass clippings and an amalgam of leaves. Then, I’ll leave it alone.
This process is patient with my intermittent availability. The good news is going to the garden and fixing things is a mood elevator. The other good news is there is plenty work waiting.