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Greetings!
Decorate your home's front entrance and enter it in the Minnesota State Horticultural Society's front door decorating contest. It's a statewide competition to get in the Christmas spirit. Participants are encouraged to use botanical product like greens, berries, dried grasses, etc. Submit a digital photo to MSHS by December 5. More information about the contest can be found on the Northern Gardener site.
Past newsletters are now archived and available for viewing. |
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Fall Chores | |
Most of us want to be done with our landscaping chores by now, and enjoy a few quiet weekends before the snow falls. But taking a few hours now will ensure a better landscape in the spring.
Lawn care for November should include removing the leaves from the lawn and applying a winter fertilizer. Raking can be tedious and painful, so I attach the bag to the mower and pick up the leaves and cut the lawn at the same time. I then toss the shredded leaves and lawn clippings into my flower beds and the compost bin.
 | | Plant trees, such as this dutch elm resistant 'Accolade' elm, until the ground freezes. |
With the first hard freeze, you can now cut back your perennial flowers. Don't cut all the way to the ground. Instead leave a couple of inches of stem to capture debris and snow to help insulate the plant. Feed the birds by leaving the seed heads of your coneflower and black-eyed Susan. Leave your ornamental grasses alone too. They add winter beauty.
Minnesota's fall has been dry. Keep watering landscape plants until the ground freezes in mid to late November. Especially pay attention to new plantings and established evergreens.
Plant a tree and your bulbs until the ground freezes. Fall is a great time to plant. The temperatures are moderate and often nurseries have their plant material on sale.
For More Information:
Northern Gardener, "Get the Roots Right!", Sept./Oct. 2010
Proper Planting of Trees and Shrubs |
| What's Blooming? Woody Plants for Cutting | |
Before running off to the garden center to buy your greenery and twigs to decorate your outdoor pots, take a look around your yard first to see what you might already have. Or consider planting some of these plants when you renovate the yard. Woody plant material commonly found in landscapes is listed below.
 | | Long needled pine boughs combined with orange-colored rose hips, dried grass flower heads and red-twig dogwood. |
Shrubs for stem/bark
Dogwoods (Cornus)
Willow (Salix)
Birch (Betula)
Burning Bush (Euonymus)
Shrubs for foliage
Boxwood (Buxus)
Oaks (Quercus)
Shrubs for fruit/Seeds
Viburnums (Viburnums)
Barberry (Berberis)
Willow (Salix)
Winterberry (Ilex)
Chokeberry (Aronia)
Birch (Betula)
Rose (Rosa)
Shrubs for flowering branches
Hydrangea (Hydrangea)
Clethera (Clethera)
Other ideas to add to outdoor pots:
Seed head of cattails
Ornamental Grasses
Cones from evergreens
Christmas ornaments
An added bonus may be these shrubs will appreciate the annual pruning. For instance, the intense red or yellow stem color on dogwoods appears on newer stems. |
I welcome your feedback on the newsletter. If there are topics you want to learn more about, please email me at nancy.dahl@integra.net.
Sincerely,
Nancy Thorman Dahl, CLP
Cattail Design LLC
Creative Designs for Land and Lakeshore | |
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Eco-friendly Tip |
 | | One inch of rain on a 1,000-square-foot roof will yield around 600 gallons of water. |
Capture some of that rain coming off your roof into a rain barrel. Use this free H2O to water your potted plants garden beds, or newly installed plants. Watering from a rain barrel is a good way to reduce water usage from the city and save you some cash. Consider, too, that many municipalities charge customers more for water when he/she uses over a certain threshold -easily done during the hot, dry days of summer.
Collectively, you, and your neighbors, can also reduce the demand on the overall system, both for water and storm water drainage by using rain barrels and rain gardens. The city can save on infrastructure improvements or from having to buy water from more expensive sources.
Many of us take our water supply for granted, probably because we live in the land of 10,000 lakes, but ample water supply is a contentious issue for many US states and countries around the world.
Check with your local county soil and water conservation office to see if or when they sell rain barrels at a wholesale or reduced cost. Order forms may be available now for a spring pick-up.
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