I'd recommend not cutting back perennials (including hostas), roses, and other plants until we get a hard, killing frost. So far, all we've had are light frosts that damage plants but don't halt their growth.

   The reasoning is that the plants are still active, and pruning stimulates new growth. Cut stuff back now and you're likely to spark new growth that will get killed by later frosts and the entire plant will be weakened.

   So hey--delay! How fun is that?

   Meanwhile, there's plenty of other fall cleanup and prep to do. Click here for a fall cleanup checklist for Iowa.

My garden isn't large, but it's intensively planted enough that I have lots of cut-back perennials, leaves, cut back roses, branches, and more to dispose of. And it's just too much for my five (yes, five) compost heaps.

   I experiment each year with how to dispose of it. Bagging it is just too expensive (I'd need, like 50) and time-consuming and the sticks would poke through the bag.

   Here's what I've played around with.

Cutting it all back and then piling it in my driveway. This takes a couple of weeks to finish (blocking my drive). I end up with enough to fill a pickup truck, and then some. Then I call a local landscaping company and have them haul it off, for a cost of as little as $30 and as much as a $100.

Borrowing a generous neighbor's pickup and loading it myself on a free yard waste day at the local landfill (check with your garbage company or the city or county government). But I had to keep that day free, and so did my neighbor, Dan, and all of the yard waste barely fit. Plus, last year there were lines, which further consumed more of my kind neighbor's time.
This year, I found out that my garbage company, Waste Management, will give me for a fee of $6 a month a yard waste dumpster, the same size as my green garbage dumpster. I can fill it up weekly and leave it on the curb every Thursday.

The East Village in Des Moines has a fun new garden shop, called Seed. Located at 500 East Grand, the site of the old Eden store, professional gardener Kenna Neighbors has created what she calls an "urban garden store" of a few plants and lots of nifty chic garden accessories. It's the kind of place I could tell my kids to go for my birthday and buy me anything thing there--I'd love it. The alpine plantings in sleek galvanized metal troughs alone, called "fairy gardens" are worth the trip.

   Click here for a fun Des Moines Register YouTube tour of the shop. Ain't technology cool sometimes?