Fall Yard Cleaning Tasks You Should Complete in September.

Autumn is majestic. Don’t get me wrong, I live for summer and the growing season, but fall is a time of year that never lets me down. In the Pacific Northwest, where I live, fall is marked by a different smell in the air, the return of cloud cover, and bursts of color from the pumpkins turning orange on the vine. All these are signals that it’s time to really start cleaning up the area in the fall. Here’s what to do this month.

Save (or donate) sunflowers

Sunflowers towering over everything in your yard should be ready for harvest, provided that’s what you decide to do with them. If you like seeds, it’s worth getting to them before the squirrels and birds do. If there is a specimen you particularly like, take enough seeds to replant next year, but remember: if you don’t save the seeds yourself, squirrels and birds will do you a favor by spreading them out for you, so the flowers will pop up on their own next year. Sunflower seeds aren’t cheap, so I like to collect the huge Russian sunflower heads that produce twenty-foot-tall sunflowers, as well as the Teddy Bear variety. To save these seeds , cut off the head and place them in front of a fan to dry. Be sure to shake off the yellow flowers and remove as many of the green ones as possible because these parts will become moldy before the seeds dry. As soon as they appear, pull out the seeds and save them until next year. (If you prefer to eat them, bake them on the lowest oven temperature for an hour.)

Remove the beans

You need to be judicious when deciding when to remove the beans. You’ll want to wait long enough to harvest as many beans as possible and let them dry, but get them out before the wet fall weather can cause them to mold. If your beans are not completely dry after harvesting, place them in a pod in front of a fan.

Removing your grilles every year is no easy task, but leaving them on all winter can cause them to wear out faster (and get blown away if your area is hurricane-prone). Before removing trellises, be sure to clear them of vines and leaves and then spray them with a bleach solution, as many plant viruses can survive the winter.

It’s time to seed your lawn and ground cover.

Depending on where in the country you live, autumn may be the best time to seed your existing lawn or start seeding a new lawn, as cooler temperatures will be more favorable to your seeds and you’ll soon benefit from the extra rainfall. Think not only about lawn seeding, but also about ground cover and clover. Red clover is an excellent annual seed to overwinter as it stops soil erosion over the winter and helps hold dirt in bare areas, but by the time spring comes it will be used up at which point it can be mowed (the soil will benefit from clover nitrogen).

More rain means easier germination for fall seedlings.

Rain makes it easier to germinate carrots, beets and onions in open ground. My constant struggle with carrots is that they require constant moisture during the germination stage, so if you don’t have rain yet, wait until it does. Then they will sprout.

Take tree pruning seriously

Stone fruit pruning should be complete by now, so if you have pears, plums or peaches and haven’t gotten to it yet, the time is near. Now every year I switch to caring for ornamental trees. I want to make sure that I get rid of any branches of the bush at a height that I can reach, i.e. branches crossing another branch or branches pointing towards the center of the tree. Opening up trees means more air can circulate, resulting in healthier trees. Then I work on any branches that I think might be blown down by heavy snowfall, especially those that overhang the street or are near power or cable lines. The closer you are to tree dormancy, the better, so early September may be too early depending on your climate, but by the end of September I’m already in full swing.

The two tools I find most useful here are the Ryobi One+ chainsaw and the pole saw . A chainsaw on an extension is the best tool for tree trimming, and it’s not as scary to use as you might expect. All this wood can be saved and used for firewood once dry, or turned into a natural fence, which is what I do with it.

Remove the berry canes

Finally, I begin the onerous task of trimming the remaining berry shoots. The blackberries and boysenberries are gone at this point, so I start patrolling the base of the stems, looking for and removing dead wood and leaving behind the green wood that will bear fruit next spring.

Don’t leave trash in the yard

This time of year I place pop-up waste bins in every corner of the garden. I’m constantly pulling weeds or plants and they invariably end up on my garden paths if I don’t have room for them. My green container fills up quickly in the fall, so these pop-ups also serve as a place to store garden waste until I can refill the container.

Composting and mulching are always ongoing. I clear out all the crops, make sure to fill and feed with compost, and then mulch everything generously, giving the trunks or stems of my plants some breathing room. This will serve as a winter snack and a warm blanket for the coming months.