Week of October 21

By Bliss McIntosh

This was a week of brilliant sunlight, full moon (and a comet) and a whole string of frosts that have transformed our gardens.  Suddenly we see green only on the plants that can take the cold.  The fourth graders came to the community garden this week to harvest their 3-sisters. October is “leave the leaves” month…sounds good, but there is much to learn about why and how to do this.

Much as I hate to lose tender flowers with the first frost, it is great to lose many of the annual weeds.  Good bye galinsoga!  Good bye ragweed!  But now we see how hardy the creeping Charlie and chickweed are and the cold hardy vegetables come into their own.  Broccoli, spinach, kale and chard, beets and carrots are all glorious now. Brussels sprouts are the real queens of the late garden, assuming that you managed to keep the cabbage loopers from riddling them with holes (like mine).  Even lettuce is able to withstand quite a bit of cold.  Arugula, endive, cilantro and parsley are all bright green, tender and delicious in the fall.  Most of these things can be left uncovered through light frosts, just getting sweeter with the cold weather.  A hard frost will take down most of these things other than the cabbage family but floating row cover spread over repurposed election sign wires will keep them going weeks or even months longer.  I like to leave Brussels sprouts standing tall, uncovered, harvesting just what I want to cook and keeping some in the ground for our Thanksgiving feast, still more than a month away. 

The latest mantra of the eco-gardening pros is to “leave the leaves”.  It has a nice ring to it but needs some un-packing to understand how it can apply to one’s own situation.  I listened to Joe Lamp’l’s interview with David Mizejewski, the wildlife gardening expert for the National Wildlife Federation, and got a firmer grasp on the complexities of leaving one’s leaves in place.  (More at nfw/leavetheleaves.)  So many people in the gardening world are living in suburbia, many with homeowner associations ruling their behavior.  Often they are required to pick up their leaves and put them out, hopefully in paper bags rather than plastic, to be picked up by trash haulers. These take up valuable landfill space where they decompose without oxygen to create methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.  Using your own leaves responsibly AND rescuing your neighborhood leaves is terribly important.  Even more significant is working to educate the people who make the rules about lawns and leaves/debris to follow the patterns set by nature rather than those suggested by the huge companies that sell you fertilizer, mulch and pesticides.

David Mizejewski starts by helping people understand that “yard” and “lawn” are not synonymous.  Leaving a thick layer of leaves on your lawn will certainly harm the grass, but making those areas under trees where the leaves collect into planting areas will cut down on the mowing and related costs, as well as the cost to the important life forms that need that leaf layer to survive.  If you follow the Doug Tallamy practice of reducing your lawn area by half, you have even less work.  Once you understand how much life is in the leaves that are left un-shredded, un-composted and in a layer only 3 to 5 inches thick, you’ll never rake up leaves again.  If you love birds then much more important than feeding them at your feeder is the practice of leaving leaves on the ground.  A large portion of a bird’s diet, especially during the baby-feeding season, is caterpillars that need that leaf layer to survive the winter in their pupal form.  Those also turn into the moths and butterflies we love.  The native bees that do so much of our pollinating live in the leafy layer, too.  The myriad forms of decomposing organisms that live there will quickly turn it into soil.  The thin layer of leaves that blow onto our grass lawns can be chopped by mowing the lawn, turning them into compost to feed the grass.  Lawns need no more fertilizer than this.  

I will continue to use the leaves that the village of Cambridge brings to the community garden.  They will smother weeds and retain moisture in our beds there.  Sometimes I will even use them thicker than the recommended 5” to start a new garden or to make a path, but at least those leaves are left whole and they aren’t going to a landfill.  Mulching with your leaves is second best to leaving them where they drop, with composting them next best.  A big pile somewhere is an improvement over sending them into the waste stream, but won’t have much benefit for the insects that are already in them as they drop from the tree.  Perhaps some of the village residents who now rake their leaves to the sidewalk where the DPW makes them disappear should think about using them on their own gardens.

One little tidbit that I picked up from listening to podcasts this week is that the insects that use the pithy stalks of tall plants like ironweed, bee balm or goldenrod use them the second summer, not the first.  The good news is that most of them occupy the lower two feet of the stalks so you can cut these things down to two feet and let them stay, hidden by new growth and not in the way. I have agonized about when to cut down stalks and now I know.  Leave the seed-rich tops for the birds the first winter, then cut to two feet in the spring and leave them until the next year.   So, no mowing those meadows, you ask?  Around here you have to mow or you end up with forest, but the suggestion is that you only mow one third of your meadow each year to give the pollinators a chance.  So much to know!

One of the frosty mornings this past week saw cheerful 4th graders coming to the community garden to harvest their three-sisters crops.  We grew the tall “Hopi blue” variety of corn again this year and it did really well once I tied it up after a wet and windy night blew it all over.  The cranberry pole beans were not so prolific this year and the butternut squash had a hard time ripening up.  I’m slowly learning the best practices for this garden.  The hills of corn need to be spaced farther apart, maybe 6 feet, so that they don’t shade out the other crops.  Fortunately these same kids, as third graders, planted a variety of dry bean called “Scott’s choice” and those did very well.  I pulled the plants about a month ago and let them dry in the shed so they were ready for shelling by the eager and able fingers of the kids.  The day before Thanksgiving recess I will go into the 4th grade classrooms with the cured blue corn and butternut squash.  I’ll bring in cooked beans.  The kids will shell the corn, grind it and then make it into corn bread to eat with the beans. They will peel and cube the squash and cook it in electric fry pans to complete the feast.  Delicious!