● Collect seeds from Annuals, Biennials, and Perennials.

● Use a tomato cage as a frame to hold up blankets, sheets, or landscape fabric above tall plants when an early frost threatens. Remove it the next day.

● Hang a shoe holder in your potting shed/garage to hold small tools and seed packets.

● After you have dug a hole for a shrub, tree, or rose bush, fill the hole with water to check the drainage. If the water takes more than 24 hours to drain, you have poor drainage and should correct it or move your planting site.

● Take cuttings from coleus and impatiens, or any easy to root annual and over-winter them by rooting them in water. Change the water periodically to keep the cuttings fresh.

● Hose down plants with a jet of water you intend to take indoors, to remove any unwanted critters hiding in the leaves.

● If the plant container has a mouse-sized hole in the top of the potting soil, it most likely contains a mouse. I leave it to you (and my husband) to remove the mouse before you move it indoors.

● Keep leaves raked off your lawn. If they collect on the grass, they can smother it. Rake them into the planting beds. They make excellent mulch around shrubs and trees.

● Hollow out pumpkins or squash to make fall cut flower containers. Use a glass jar or bowl inside so that there are no leaks.

+ Fill with cut mums and/or branches of fall leaves.
+ You can also purchase small pots of flowers and put pot and all into the bowl-lined harvest.
+ Use it as a cornucopia and fill it with multi-colored peppers or other vegetables, like turnips, onions, and potatoes.

● Make a pot to clean and oil your garden tools after every use by filling a 5-gallon bucket with sand and adding clean motor oil to it. Dip the tool up and down several times into the mix and the sand will remove dirt; the oil will stop rust from forming.

● Fall is a great time to construct a new planting bed.

+ Cover the soil, weeds, grass, and all with newspapers several pages thick. Be sure to overlap them.
+ Water the newspaper well so it won’t blow around.
+ Add compost and/or good garden soil on top of the paper.
+ Mulch the whole thing with leaves or straw.
+ Let it all work throughout the winter and plant the bed in the spring or plant right through the paper this fall.

● You can prune shrubs and trees once they are dormant.

+ Prune to remove dead wood at any time.
+ Remember to leave spring-flowering plants and any plant that sets its buds the summer before, like hydrangeas, alone until after they flower. Otherwise, you remove the flower buds.
+ Pruning forces new growth on growing plants. Never prune when frost or freeze will hit an actively growing plant. That’s why we prune in the late spring after all frost/freeze is finished, or the summer, or in winter – never in the early fall when frost or freeze can kill a plant with new growth.

Posted by Anne K Moore, October 20, 2008---