Fall Cleanup: Cut Down or Pull Out?

While cleaning up the veggie garden last Fall, my hubby asked me a great question:
   "Why are the Sunflowers pulled out but that Daisy plant (it was an Echinacea) was cut down at the ground?"

When we married, he had a few scrubby-looking plants around the house foundation and the rock garden that the former owners had created was most grass weeds. He was totally content to keep the "garden" just the way it was.

After a period of adjustment (several summers) he learned to accept that I was going to buy and plant lots of trees, shrubs and flowers. Last summer he even helped me build raised cedar beds for the vegetable garden.

But the plants remained in just two categories for him: organized and dis-organized. It's an engineers mind that classifies flowering plants that way and it's not always easy for a gardener to predict (Foxgloves are organized, Geraniums aren't). He's never gone beyond that simple classification so I wasn't surprised by his question during last year's annual Fall cleanup. He doesn't know about perennials and annuals or our hardiness zone (as an avid reader, he does know there are such things) and he knows that some trees are evergreens because, well, duh!

So we had a little Gardening 101 out by the burn pile which was stacked high with spent sunflowers, yarrow stems, butterfly bush branches and corn stalks.

This is what "The Class" sounded like:

The Peonies are herbaceous perennials - the stems will rot and die back when the frost hits them but will always sprout new stems next Spring. We cut them back to remove any hiding places for over-wintering insects.

The Sunflowers are self-seeding annuals - we have them every Summer in just about the same place because the birds have spread the seeds. Nothing will grow from this year's roots so we pull them out of the soil to make room for next year's plants.

The Shasta Daisies are perennials that hunker down in winter and manage to keep a few sad-looking leaves growing right through snowfall. So they get cut back, leaving a small leaf rosette to support the roots this Winter.

It's sad every year to pull out the frost-killed plants (the veggie garden looks particularly bleak by November) and the compost pile behind the garage is very large with withered annuals, seedless weeds and dead squash vines. But next Spring when we can see the first new  green shoots appear in the barren garden beds, it'll be heartening to realize that February is far behind and May will, once again, soon arrive in Central Oregon.

If you want to know more about the plants in your yard, this is a link to OSU's Landscape Plant ID:  http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ldplants/. You can search by Latin or Common Name.