What's NOT Working in your Garden?

Why FALL is the best time to Start Improving your Garden for 2025

September 28, 2024

Fall Gardening Tip

Greetings Good Grower 👩‍🌾

At the end of each season, we assess what didn’t work in this year’s garden, so we can improve on those disappointments for next season.

You might think the time to start implementing those changes is next spring…but I believe FALL is the best time to get started for reasons listed below…

Get Rid of ONE Plant? 🌿🤔 

To make this a manageable gardening task, start with one simple change…get rid of one underperforming plant.

There are several reasons you might choose to get rid of plants in your butterfly and pollinator garden:

  1. Aggressive or Invasive Growth

  2. Proven over time not to attract and support monarchs

  3. Proven over time not to attract and support a wide variety of pollinators

  4. Too- short of a bloom period

  5. Wasp Magnet 🧲 (yes, wasps are pollinators too, but many gardeners don’t want to attract them in mass)

Those are just 5 factors to consider, but you may have others to consider for your garden growing forward.

For us in 2024, that plant is…

Stiff Goldenrod (Solidago rigida) is a pain in the 🫏. It has a too-short bloom period and the root system is extremely aggressive…this year it crowded out our liatris patch. It does attract pollinators, but mostly wasps in our northern garden.

So this fall, I’m digging out all the goldenrod from one of our gardens. Next spring, we will replace the goldenrod with hollyhock, which should play better with existing plants.

There are 2 reasons I’m digging up the goldenrod now:

  1. I can clearly identify all the existing plants…in the spring, it’s difficult to tell the difference between goldenrod and New England Aster leaves.

  2. We are fall-planting tulip bulbs and would like to add a few to this garden space for a beautiful burst of color next spring.

So good GROWer, can you think of any plants that have overgrown their welcome in your garden? Fall is a great time to say: Hosta la Vista, Baby! 😉

Coming Up?

Now that you’ve dug out existing offenders, is there anything you could consider transplanting this fall? We’ll discuss this in your next newsletter…

Blue Skies and Migrating Butterflies,

Tony your Butterfly Guide