It’s good to leave the ‘skeletons’ of some herbaceous plants standing over winter. The natural scaffolding and seed heads of Sedum spectabile (ice plant), Eryngium (sea holly) and ornamental grasses help to protect the tender crowns from the sharpest frosts, provide a cosy home for insects and add general winter interest to the garden.
The seed heads of Sedum spectabile provided great winter interest in the garden
But now that things are warming up, it’s time to remove last year’s debris and let fresh green leafiness take free reign once more.
Get chopping (or pulling)
If you haven’t done so already, don’t delay, get chopping! Secateurs work best for most herbaceous perennials. Cut as close to the crown as you can, cutting at an angle to prevent water collecting inside and rotting the crown, or cut just above any fresh new growth.
In fact, at this time of year, you’ll be able to simply pull some of the hollow dead stems out from the base of the plant without cutting at all.
The joy of shredding
Remove any diseased material, but don’t throw the rest. It’s fabulous organic material that can be put back to use around the garden.
After three 15-minute sessions I had a huge bag of shreddable material
Ideally, shred it. Most domestic shredders will cope with woody stems less than 3–4 cm (1¼-1½ inches) in diameter. I shredded the above bagful of woody material last weekend. The shredder made a hell of a racket (for which I profusely apologise to my neighbours), but within 15 minutes I had reduced one large bag of winter debris to a bucketful of useful chippings; wonderful ‘brown’ material for the compost bin, or a fabulous mulch for the borders.
15 minutes of shredding produced a bucketful of compostable organic material
If you don’t have a shredder, then simply cut up what you can into bitesize pieces. It all helps!
I add all my ‘shreddings’ to the compost bin. Alongside all the kitchen waste, it makes great compost.
A barrowful of homemade compost – great for spring mulching
Marvellous mulch
Which brings me to the last of this trio of spring jobs: ‘tis the season to get mulching! According to Monty Don (my husband has been hearing that phrase a lot lately):, mulching is “probably the best single investment of time and money that anyone could put into their garden”* for 3 reasons:
1. Mulching reduces weeds.
2. Mulching retains moisture.
3. Mulching improves the structure of your soil.
Oh, and it makes the garden look tidier too! What’s not to like about mulch? (I love the word ‘mulch’!)
To be honest, until this year my mulching has been rather sporadic, mainly because I only have 2 smallish compost bins and have never produced enough material to get around all the borders. But this year, I went the whole hog and ordered 900 litres of soil conditioner, which I’m currently spreading around my garden with wild abandon.
A mulched border – weed free, water retentive, and the earthworms will be happy too
My garden has been giving me so much pleasure for so many years that I felt like it deserved a treat (and there was a special offer on at B&Q), especially as I have heavy clay soil that needs all the help it can get.
Try to do as much work in your borders as you can before you mulch (weeding, dividing perennials etc.) so that you disturb them as little as possible afterwards. Then pile the mulch on the soil surface and around the bases of your plants to about 2 inches thick, taking care not to smother the crowns. The earthworms will do the rest.
Pile the mulch around your herbaceous plants, up to 2 inches thick and up to the bases
Finding the time
It sounds a lot of work, but 15 minutes of cutting, shredding or mulching at a time and you’ll soon have it done. And when you’re sitting back with a glass of wine in the evening sunshine (hmm, we can but hope!), you’ll be glad you did it, 15 minutes of green at a time.
After all that mulching, find the time to enjoy your spring garden
Let me know whether you mulch your garden, and what with.
*https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2006/mar/05/gardens