If you start early enough (before any plants have put on more than two or three inches of new growth), you can use a garden rake to clear away dead material from last year, just raking right over the top of everything in the bed. If you miss your time window, it is much more difficult to clear the beds because you are working around new plants. And cleaning up individual plants by trying to cut out dead stems that are intertwined with this year's new growth is a real pain!
Beware: walking on wet soil compacts it, which is really bad for the garden! It helps to put down a few boards, flat stones, tiles, etc. to stand on . . . or just keep your garden beds narrow enough so that you can reach them from the edges or paths without having to walk in them.
Why not do the garden clean-up in fall? Well, for one thing, there's just not enough time to get it all done! If I tackle sections of the yard one by one, there's a chance that most of it will be done by spring! I do like to completely clear the area outside my back porch in fall, because on the rare occasions when we get snow, I like looking across an unbroken expanse outside my living room windows. My rose bed, on the other hand, gets left untouched until mid-spring. Time management tip: if you cluster the earliest spring blooms in one or two places, not only will you get a spectacular spring focus on those beds, but you can also plan to clear those beds the earliest in spring, and leave other beds until a little later.
Here are some other reasons to wait:
- Some people just think of it as messy, but dried seedheads and the skeletal remains of plants can add winter interest to a garden. This is especially true of plants like grasses, sedums, and rudbeckias.
- It's easier if you wait! By this time of year, the old stems are thoroughly dry, and many can be cleaned up simply by grasping it and breaking it off at the base. This can make cleanup a lot speedier! Back in the fall, you would have had to cut off each and every stem to clear away many of the same plants.
- Leaving dead stems can make a plant more likely to survive the winter. Marginally hardy chrysanthemums, for example, are much more likely to survive if last year's stems are left on until spring. Leaving the last few roses to form hips, instead of deadheading right up to the end of the season, seems to signal the plant to "harden off" for winter. Cutting them back can also trigger new growth, which can be disastrous at the wrong time of year (including too early in the spring).
