What Your Garden Is Telling You This Fall

By late August in Calgary, the garden starts to tell the truth. The lushness of early summer has settled, a few things are beginning to fade, and after months of watching everything grow, you can finally get a pretty good read on what worked and what didn't.

Before you start cutting things back and cleaning up for fall, spend some time looking around.

Which plants thrived? What flowered longer than you expected? Which containers still look great, and which ones needed far more water and attention than you planned on giving them?

The things that struggled are worth noticing too.

Maybe a perennial never really took off, one corner of the garden was constantly dry, or a bed looked fantastic in June and had very little going on by August. It's tempting to simply replace the plant next year, but first consider why it didn't work.

Sun, soil, moisture and Calgary's drying winds can make two spots on the same property behave surprisingly differently. Sometimes changing what you plant is the answer; sometimes it's changing where you plant it.

Look beyond the flowers

Late summer is also a good time to see the underlying structure of your garden.

Once some of the flowers begin to fade, the shrubs, grasses, evergreens, foliage and seed heads become much more noticeable.

If a garden suddenly feels a little empty at this point in the season, adding more flowers isn't necessarily the answer.

It may need plants that provide shape, texture or interest for a longer stretch of the year. That's particularly important here, where our gardens spend far more time outside peak summer bloom than they do looking like they did in July.

And when cleanup time arrives, resist the urge to cut absolutely everything down.

Grasses and seed heads can look beautiful through fall and winter, and many also provide food and habitat for birds and beneficial insects. There are things that should be removed, of course, but a garden doesn't need to be stripped bare to be ready for winter.

There's still gardening to do

September can still be a very good planting month in Calgary.

For many hardy trees, shrubs and perennials, cooler air and soil that is still warm create good conditions for establishing roots without the stress of summer heat.

Our fall can turn quickly, though, so this isn't the time to push your luck with something marginally hardy or forget about watering. New plantings still need consistent moisture as they head toward freeze-up.

One of the simplest things you can do right now has nothing to do with planting at all: take pictures.

Photograph the containers you loved, combinations you'd use again, areas that finally filled in and the spots that never quite came together. By February, it's surprisingly hard to remember exactly what bothered you in August.

Those photos, along with a few notes about what worked and what didn't, will give you a much better starting point when you're planning next year's garden.

Fall doesn't have to mean we're finished with the garden. It's a chance to look at what the season taught us, make a few adjustments and start thinking about what we'd like to do differently next year.

After all, that's really how good gardens are built: one season at a time.