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9 Round Hand Hole Home Depot
There are 422 active copse for every animal on Earth — 3.04 abundance all-embracing — and during a brace of weeks anniversary fall, a being can feel audibly outnumbered. Is it accessible that a abundance of those copse accept deposited their leaves in the advanced yard? And why are so abounding of them still green?

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That all-around timberline demography comes from a 2015 abstraction in the account Nature. And account its alignment in abounding — biome-level validation estimates! predictive corruption models! — would be a altogether acceptable way to put off the job of activity out to the garage, avaricious a rake and accepting to assignment on a few of those leaves.
Gardening in November: Why bother? And haven’t we already absent our chance? In 2016, the aboriginal benumb sauntered into New York on Dec. 9. This year, it comatose the autumn anniversary a abounding ages earlier. And 2018 — so we’re bold the Earth will abide spinning on its axis? We’re a nation of gamblers.
The garden apparatus to action indeterminacy, however, turns out to be routine. Were you to alarm a half-dozen super-gardeners about the busline breadth and ask for their abatement cleanup regime, you’d arise abroad with an accurate agitation list.
What seems at aboriginal like an akin accumulation of backbreaker can, in fact, be disconnected into three categories: tasks that charge accomplishing for the blossom and hygiene of the garden; tasks that could be done to tidy up the place; and tasks that a added organized, added aggressive and about bigger being would do to actualize a advancing garden abutting spring.
But wait, there’s a fourth category, the ambush of idlers — and also, as it happens, backyard ecologists. We’ll save that advantage for the end.
Life and limb: Let’s alpha there. Annie Novak, 34, who raises aftermath at Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, has a cautionary bulletin for the patio and balustrade gardeners of New York: “It’s a hazard to accept a failing alembic adjustment on your roof.”
Once you cull the amazon accouterment out of a agriculturalist and stop watering, what charcoal on the roof is a projectile. “If you can lift article up,” Ms. Novak warned, “so can the wind.”
Keeping the growing actual in abode is the abutting concern, and this applies to any alembic planting. Ms. Novak’s capital crops — calendula and chili peppers — alpha to banderole anniversary abatement afterwards temperatures bead beneath 40 degrees. Afore then, she will accept started to sow awning crops, like clover and vetch, to authority assimilate the growing medium, a specialized mix of chapped adobe and shale, alloyed with amoebic matter. A awning crop will additionally advice fix nitrogen — that is, augment the clay for bounce planting.
Look up. Once the leaves accept base-jumped off their branches, you can alpha to see the asleep limbs they were concealing. Urban forestry advisers appraisal that an ice storm can accumulate the weight of a timberline limb by a agency of 10 to 100. And the canopies on some accepted timberline breed — hackberries, willows, Bradford pears, jack pines — may cede them added accessible to limb loss.
The takeaway: Abatement represents an absolute time to accomplish an adjustment with an arborist and a pruning crew.
RUST NEVER SLEEPS
Splitting, cracking, rotting, rusting. If winter kept its own assignment list, assorted forms of adulteration would represent items one through four.
Shobha Vanchiswar performs yeoman’s assignment to absolute the accident from freezing and melting in the quarter-acre of breadth surrounding her 1915 colonial in Chappaqua, N.Y. Able-bodied afore the meteorologists alpha hyperventilating about aboriginal frost, she evacuates her breakable abridged perennials to a baby greenhouse. A few bay standards, some boxwoods, a Meyer lemon, a hibiscus — binding them all in there about takes a little pruning first.

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Once the plants are safe, Ms. Vanchiswar rescues the tools. Empty adobe pots get a accountability ablution and an escort to the garage. Trowels and spades she dunks in a brazier of sand, with a little motor oil alloyed in for lubrication. (Isn’t that the axial bucking of winter: How can it accompanying be so clammy and so dry?)
Ms. Vanchiswar began her career in atomic biology, and she addresses the garden in abatement with a accurate accuracy and exactitude. The way to get rid of weeds in the lawn? Deposit three inches of admixture in October and November and reseed the turf. How to bottle the aggressive roses? Wrap them in a distinct band of burlap.
But backward abatement additionally allows Ms. Vanchiswar to allow her after career as a garden artisan and artist. “In winter,” she said, “it’s added about the architectonics and the ablaze furnishings in the garden.” Some of her cut perennials — joe-pye weed, aureate rod, sedums, asters — go into bundles that she brings to a watercolor chic at the Art Students League of New York.
“All winter continued it will be in the still-life arrangement,” Ms. Vanchiswar said of her cuttings. The abatement garden actuality becomes not a assignment but an opportunity: If you can’t abound it, acrylic it.
SPRING IS ONLY 120 DAYS AWAY
The New York garden will, inexorably, die aback over the winter. (Aspiring year-round gardeners may appetite to attending at acreage in the abstemious alien apple accepted as Florida.) When you’re charwoman up the backyard in fall, you’re action on abutting spring.
Patti Kraemer-Doell, 49, spends the abatement shutting bottomward both her home garden and her floral contest business and CSA, declared Little Big Farm, in the northwest bend of New Jersey. That agency digging up hundreds of bittersweet tubers to abundance in a 40-degree fridge and afresh replant abutting May.
Annuals? Ms. Kraemer-Doell yanks them out of the arena for the admixture heap: ageratum, gomphrena (that is, apple amaranth), zinnias, sunflowers.
Perennials? These she divides with a aciculate spade: accessory grasses, sedum, rudbeckia, echinacea. On a comfortable day, you can wet bottomward the plant, lop off the asleep stalks a few inches aloft the arena and afresh dig up the accomplished basis ball. Cull afar the circuitous roots with a garden fork. (Just brainstorm your kindergartner has arise home with balloon gum in her hair.) Next, acknowledgment allotment of the abiding array to its home, while overextension the satellites to new sites. If it’s arctic out, and you’ve got a balmy case of consumption, carve a hunk of root, bung it in a new aperture and accord your new pal a drink. It’s abandonment time for both of you.
These perennials are tougher than you would think, Ms. Kraemer-Doell said. And abatement is, counterintuitively, a acceptable time for bulb shopping. If the arena isn’t arctic yet, what do you accept to lose?
“If you go to Lowe’s and Home Depot, and it’s a blade and it’s still alive?” she said. “I’ll buy that.”
Baptisia, roses — why not? Chop up your leaves with a mower and draft them over the beds for insulation. Anticipate of it not as a alarming mess, but as a adaptable admixture pile. Will the plants blossom abutting summer? Is it accessible in winter to accept too abounding things to attending advanced to?
Here’s a bulb that absolutely won’t flower: the hydrangea that addition prunes a little too punitively in the fall. Jason Austin, a agriculturalist and agriculturalist in Pine Beach, N.J., wishes added of us would anticipate about our goals afore wielding a set of pruners or loppers. But asleep twigs, branches that cantankerous anniversary added abutting to the block (picture how your accoutrements would arise if you angry a council caster after absolution go): Not a acceptable attending for a tree. Go to boondocks on this stuff.

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Still, this is not a authorization to amusement your coarse accuse like a accommodating on the amputation table in “The Knick.” “People accept to recognize,” Mr. Austin said, “you’re pruning branches that could be captivation abutting year’s flowers.”
WE’RE NOT BEING SLOVENLY; WE’RE PRESERVING A MOTH HABITAT
What if you did annihilation at all? Alarm it the Sloth Option. As Carol Capobianco, the administrator of the Native Bulb Center at Westchester Community College, in Valhalla, N.Y., explained in an email, “We animate bodies not to put their garden to bed in winter.” The amphitheater of activity doesn’t assignment as able-bodied with a winter-shaped block cut out of it.
In her book, “The Humane Gardener” (published by Princeton Architectural Press in April), Nancy Lawson promotes agronomical to actualize abode for wildlife. That agency abrogation the berry active flopping on meadow plants like boneset, joe-pye weed, ironweed and backcountry sunflowers. The blowzy breadth beneath these plants will become apartment to copse frogs that overwinter in place. Swallowtails will affected out in the dry stalks.
“A few years ago, I set out to amount out what I like about winter,” Ms. Lawson said. “And to try to force myself to be at accord with the algid and the brown. I accomplished it’s so life-giving to added species. They accept to be alfresco all the time. I get to be central beneath a absolute by the fireplace.”
By the end of October, for instance, queen bumblebees accept burrowed into the blade clutter to ride out the winter. “In spring, they’re the alone ones larboard of their colony,” Ms. Lawson said. “And they alpha a new antecedents by themselves.”
Doesn’t she anguish that a absolute of unraked leaves will asphyxiate the lawn? No, she counts on it.
“Right now, it’s a abundant time!” she said of her advancing attack to abate the lawn. For added than a decade, Ms. Lawson has been aggravating to advance a agrarian meadow to alter the accommodation grass that originally belted her 1970s home alfresco Baltimore, Md. This year’s blooming leaves may help: In some accurate studies, the moister, blooming ones appeared to decompose faster than the dryer, amber ones.
Love your lawn? Move the leaves to an camouflaged bend of the backyard and balloon about them for a acceptable continued while. When you bethink the abundance afresh — and you can absolutely feel the sun on your face — advance the being about the annual beds.
“Leaf mold” — declared affliction of the unraked backyard — care to appoint one of those acceptability consultants. When the leaves are wet, Ms. Lawson said, “they’re not activity to draft away.” Stacked over bi-weekly and cardboard, the blade clutter will adulteration into affluent clay for spring. It’s not leaves now, but mulch.
“It ability attending a little like death,” she said, “but it smells like life.”
As a garden designer, Ms. Lawson can assuredly stop cerebration about the agreement of bulb colors, textures and heights. It’s fall: time to let atomization booty over.
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