It's cold out there, but at least it rained

I've been accustomed all spring, summer and fall to whisk out the kitchen door and snip lettuce, spinach and other greens from the pots on my back porch without bothering to put on a jacket.

Last night, though, as I gathered spinach leaves to toss in a stir-fry and lettuce for salad, I realized I was freezing. There was a full moon, but it was still dark enough before dinner that I was snipping greens by flashlight. In the flashlight's beam I could see my breath.

So this unnaturally long, warm fall is finally over. The weather folks are predicting temperatures down to the teens tomorrow night. It's time for the final harvest. Today, after I go pick up the turkey and toast the cornbread for the stuffing, I'll make a final collection of spinach, lettuce, baby bok choy and herbs from all the boxes.

This would also be, in the abstract, a good time to empty the potting mix out of all the pots and boxes into the compost pile before it freezes. But somehow I doubt I'll get that done the day before Thanksgiving.

Well, Thanksgiving is supposed to be a harvest festival, isn't it? So I'll harvest.

People with floating row covers or cold frames to protect greens from cold can keep them going much longer; I know people who get crops of spinach in January in cold frames, even in Chicago. But it's hard to swing that on a third-floor porch. I don't think the fire department would like me building a cold frame to block the fire exit.

I still haven't had a hard frost in my ground-level garden, though I have friends farther out in the suburbs who have. The toad lilies down by the front walk are still blooming, though I'm sure that will be over in a day or two.

The long warm fall has been something of an inconvenience. I couldn't start planting bulbs until almost a month later than usual, because you don't want bulbs to go into too-warm soil. They might sprout. As I spread shredded-leaf mulch, I have found sprouts from some of the existing daffodils, confused by November days in the 60s.

My big worry, though, has been rain. We didn't get any until a couple of days ago. For at least three months, I never saw more than an insignificant sprinkle in my rain gauges.

I've been watering a lot, because I planted a lot of new perennials, shrubs and conifers this year. The received wisdom is that late summer or early autumn is a good time to plant, because the increased rain of fall will help new plants establish their root systems before the soil freezes, without being stressed by hot weather. But that's only if it actually does rain. And as I've planted bulbs, I've realized that in places where I haven't watered the soil is bone-dry at least a foot down, well below the major root zone of most garden plants.

In cold-winter areas like Chicago, plants really need to load up their root systems with water to get through the winter, and new plants haven't had the opportunity to develop enough of a root systems to collect water from a very wide area. And around here, we can't count on snow to help out with the watering. So unless it rains a lot, new plants need watering in fall.

Evergreens -- even established evergreens -- are especially vulnerable. Not just their roots, but their leaves or needles need to be full of water to resist the drying of winter winds. If they go into winter too dry, whole branches often die by spring.

But finally, on Monday, we got a series of major thunder boomers accompanied with downpours that eventually trailed off into exactly the kind of long, slow rain you want to soak the soil in autumn. I was downtown for meetings with people who couldn't understand my delight when we emerged into the lobby to see the rain pelting down onto Wabash Avenue and pouring off the L tracks. To them it meant a wet walk wrestling with an umbrella in the wind and maybe a miserable drive home. To me, it meant garden salvation.

I still have bulbs to plant, so I'll have an opportunity to check and see how much moisture actually got into the soil. And I'm not putting the hoses away yet; I need to water in the bulbs, and there will be more above-freezing days when I can still supply some moisture insurance for the new and transplanted viburnums, aronia, fothergilla, dwarf lilacs, hydrangeas, sedges, lamium, hostas, heuchera, Canadian wild ginger, red-twig dogwood, sweet woodruff, lady's mantle, Solomon's seal and Canadian hemlock. With a good water supply and a blanket of leaves, they'll be ready for whatever winter brings.

And this fall, with its atypical warmth and uncharacteristic dryness, is a reminder that you can't count on any season in Chicago to go by the book.

Update: I was pelted with sleet as I harvested the greens. But there's enough for Thanksgiving dinner.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Me on Metropolitan Gardening

Bronx-based Bryan Ogden interviewed me about my garden for bis blog, Metropolitan Gardening. Kind of weird being the interviewed instead of the interviewer, but I survived. Take a look.

Enough politics, let's talk leaves

Finally! I can watch TV again without feeling like the victim of an acid attack from all the political ads. But I'd rather be gardening.

We've had a weird fall, lots of warm days, no good crisp bulb-planting weather and next to no rain. There still hasn't been a freeze in my garden; elephant ears and impatiens are straggling along yet. I've quit watering the elephant ears to encourage them to go dormant so I can stash the tubers in a box of dry shredded leaves in my friend's garage. (I don't have a garage, or a nice unheated basement or crawl space where I could overwinter tubers.)

I have a lot of daffodil and scilla and allium bulbs that are just sort of hanging around waiting to be planted, because I want bulbs to go into cool soil.

So the only substantive gardening I've been able to do is, actually, one of my favorite tasks: gathering leaves.

Yup, gathering. You may be trying to get rid of your leaves, but I'm collecting every leaf I can get. Free soil amendment, free compost ingredient, free mulch, the highest and best kind of soil food and tree food, and all free. Yet most of my neighbors carefully rake all their leaves away from their gardens. That's OK: all the more for me.

I love raking leaves. It's good exercise, at a time of year when it's cool enough so I don't get wrung out and overheated. As my leaves visibly pile up, in my compost bins, on my perennial beds, in the space between the buildings were I keep my surplus stash, I feel tremendously accomplished.

And, let's face it, mighty smug. I am, apparently, the only gardener on my block smart enough to treasure all this useful biomass. The sense of intellectual and moral superiority is almost enough to tip me over.

In my suburb, homeowners -- or their landscape contractors -- rake (or more likely blow) leaves to the curb to be picked up by village contractors. In some suburbs, though, people have to bag their leaves, and then actually pay to have them picked up as landscape waste. Either way, the leaves end up at vast commercial composting facilities where they are quickly hot-composted in giant long piles, turned by bulldozers. The resulting compost is then wholesaled to landscape contractors.

So let's review: You pay to have the leaves raked up. You pay to have them carted away to become the raw material for somebody's business. Then next spring, you pay your landscape contractor to apply fertilizer and mulch to your lawn and garden beds, to serve the very purposes that could be served by the leaf litter you so carefully raked away.

Or, if you're nice and green, you pay to have your landscape contractor apply compost -- in which case you may be buying back, in decomposed form, the very leaves you paid to have carted away in fall.

That's if I don't get to them first. Because after I have tucked away all the leaves that fall on my own garden, I snatch all I can from the curbside piles before the village contractors with the backhoes and industrial-size shredder can get to them. I just rake them onto a tarp and tow them home.

Last week I found four great big bags full of leaves in the alley behind the Lutheran church up the block. Bagging leaves is not standard procedure around here, so I assume the church's landscape contractor usually works somewhere else. But I was happy: The bags were easy to drag back to my yard, where the contents (mostly nice dry crisp ash leaves) became mulch over the roots of my newly planted shrubs. Thanks, Lutherans!

My trees thank them too. Most urban trees are starved for leaves. Think about it: Where did deciduous trees evolve? with their root systems under a blanket of their own fallen leaves, that's where. That's what they're built for. The soil is full of fungi that will leap at the chance to break down leaves, releasing nutrients to the trees' roots. There are special fungi that evolved along with the trees, living right on the tree roots, to serve precisely this function to the benefit of both. Yet most people tidily remove all the leaves that should be feeding this exquisite system.

Now, I do rake the leaves off the lawn, more or less. Lawn grass is not designed to be covered by leaves. (It's not designed to grow under trees, either; it evolved in open fields in Eurasia.) A mat of leaves will block sunlight to the grass and create conditions that can encourage unsightly fungus diseases. But a few leaves here and there are fine. In fact, they'll feed the earthworms and other creatures that are probably living in your lawn soil, if you haven't poisoned and fertilized it to death.

Fortunately, I don't have much lawn. And for perennials, shrubs and trees, leaves are an unparalleled mulch and soil amendment.

I mostly just rake leaves over where I want them. I use an electric leaf shredder to shred the ones for the compost bins. I mix the shreds with all the other garden waste there is this time of year -- pots of annuals, dead vegetables -- along with handfuls of old compost here and there to provide a starter population of bacteria, fungus spores, and insect, worm and arthropod eggs to do the composting work.

Shredding leaves is a bit of work, but it has two virtues: The smaller pieces break down faster, in situations like a compost bin where you want them to break down faster. And shredded leaves are more inclined to stay put rather than blowing around.

By spring, the vast majority of all the leaves I have gathered from all over the neighborhood will have melted, as if by magic, into the soil. Fungi are my shoemaker's elves.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

The day after

Well, the election's over. It took me 10 minutes of hunting just to find out the results of the Cook County Metropolitan Water Reclamation District commissioner races -- that's how little attention is paid by news organizations to an environmentally important but utterly unsexy agency.

The good news: Michael Alvarez and Mariyana Spyropoulos won, each with 23 percent of the vote. The bad news: Paul Chialdikas didn't. He got only 13 percent of the votes, losing to old-line Democrat Barbara McGowan, who got 22.

These are among the many offices that have been traditionally passed out as patronage spoils by the old Democratic machine since time immemorial, because Democrats would just shrug and do what their precinct captains told them to do in races too boring to care about. There's not all that much Democratic machine left, but there's some, in places. Hence McGowan.

I have hopes for Michael Alvarez and Mariyana Spyropoulos, though. They both seem to grasp that the agency exists primarily to safeguard health and produce clean, well-managed water, not patronage jobs. With incumbent Debra Shore, they may have enough votes to push a few long-overdue changes.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.