Fall is nearly upon us, temps have dropped and rain keeps coming.

I'm pretty new to the gardening scene and am renting a house with a lawn and garden that seems to need a lot of work. Today I'm removing vines from the side of the house and anywhere else I can find them, pruning back the rhodies and mulching. I've never mulched before, but I'm going to try the cardboard method followed by a layer of black hardwood mulch. These rhododendrons are growing wild, too, and threatening to bust through the windows. I've read that pruning this late might cause loss of flowers next year, but at this point it seems necessary.

How are you spending these mild days?

My normal fall routine is to cut to the ground my perennials that look ratty, leaving those that hold well to stand over winter for the birds. Then I mulch with chopped up leaves. I often 'miss' that window (the rains come and soak the leaves making it difficult to pick up with the lawnmower) and am hoping to find an alternate source for raked leaves. One of my brother-in-laws is a yard guy, but he tends to use a lot of chemicals, which gives me pause. I think if I just went for the maple leaves, they would have just sat on the lawns for a short time and who treats maples with anything around here? They grow like weeds. And have good russet color.

I ended up cutting a lot more back yesterday than I expected. I had no idea that mulch would make my flowerbeds look so nice, either, and I ended up going with a black mulch. I'm now planning on covering the other front bed and cutting out larger beds along both sides of the house. Unfortunately I'm going to have to pull up a bunch of bulbs, but I haven't decided yet what to do with them. They sit too close together and too close to the house making it easy for the vines to climb and difficult for me to get in there to tear it all out.

Bonehead, do you have a local neighborhood board like nextdoor neighbor or on facebook that you could ask around for leaves on?

SpaceFarmer, good idea. I do have a local buy/sell FB page and likely folks that live in town might have bagged leaves I could just pick up. Slight problem, our youngest son 'borrowed' our truck last February. Might be time to reclaim it... we're going down to his place this weekend (an hour out). Our leaves haven't really started to drop yet, but will soon.

I find it difficult to find how to cut back plants in the fall. My guess is that this likely is drastically different for different climate zones - some folks get a thick snow cover that lasts all winter, others are in much milder regions with year-round growth. I know I will often get a 2nd bloom from flowers I cut back hard, not nearly as full as the main bloom but welcome spots of color. Perhaps we can share how we treat things in our temperate NW.

In years past, I've left many of my perennials standing over winter. This is a messy look, but provides both food (if there are seedheads) and shelter for birds and small mammals. This year I am planning to cut back most everything to about 6-8 inches, then cover with a 3-4 inch layer of shredded leaves. I will leave those I know the birds will feast on (coneflowers, joe pye, etc.) I am hopeful that leaving some bare stems poking out of the mulch will alert me next spring to where to brush back the leaves when things start waking up.

What are your strategies?

This time of year is a good time to trim trees and large and small shrubs. It's helpful to trim back any cross branches and thin out the trees making them sail worthy for winter storms and protect homes from falling branches by looking for weak, heavy out of scale or diseased tree branches. Rhodies this time of year is a good time to trim. I climb underneath them to cut out branches to open them up for good air circulation. This time of year the plants will not send signals to the plant from trimming to send out more growth, instead plants have shut down from climate and light ready for whatever winter has in store for them and have energy for root growth for next season. Then there's the burn pile....

Then when the leaves start their assault I have a mulcher on my mower will mulch a lot of leaves over the lawn to feed the lawns . Then some leaves go into a flower bed for mulch while other leaves end up in the pastures. That's a big job with this garden. Thank goodness for blowers!

Hey Bumplbea, thanks for the recommendations! I've heavily pruned most of the rhodies, and still have just a little more to do on the last one. They're rather large and beautiful, but I feel like they're constantly threatening to break into the house via the windows.

Spacefarmer. Rhodies can be cut down to just a few inches from the ground. You will lose blooms for one year and then they will bloom on renewed growth. I inherited several growing on Whidbey and they were totally neglected for years and ugly - so I cut them to about one foot - my neighbor who worked at the Meerkerk Garden www.meerkerkgardens.org/ said that they would cut them to just inches - but I had almost finished the project and left them as cut. They came right back and were absolutely gorgeous.

Winterizing? In the back garden, I leave perennials as is to feed the birds and other critters. Looks a little messy but that is fine with me. In the front garden, we have to tidy up or the Snoop Committee (HOA) will have a fit. They go for the tidy, perfect (sterile) look! If it were up to me I would outlaw shearers. Perfectly round rhodies and azaleas are all over the neighborhood but I think they are ugly. Beautiful weeping Japanese maples are trimmed exactly one or two feet from the ground so they look like green open umbrellas. Oh well, to each his/her own.

We are continuing to add layer upon layer of organic materials to our garden space: leaves of any and all varieties that I can get my hands on, sawdust from the local woodworker's shop, ground up vegetables left over from the organic farms here in the neighbourhood (probably 200-300 pounds a week), in addition to chicken manure from my free ranging hens. When we established the vegetable garden 3 years ago, it was on heavily compacted clay that had been a horse corral. We tilled in a high dose organic fertilizer, lime, oyster shell, and ground fish meal one time. Since then, we have been building up the soil on top of that base by composting in place, without using a tiller on it again. This past spring, we finally we had earthworms! Our vegetable garden space is roughly 100' x 100' or 1/4 acre.

That is a BIG vegetable garden. When our two kids were at home, we maintained a garden that was about 100' x 40' and it served us well. I did a lot of canning and freezing. I've since converted our veggie garden to a bit smaller herb garden, and rely on various farm stands for fresh produce.

Impressive!
I also garden on compacted soil, A big input of organic material my first year in the worst spot, changed it from so solid I had to use a pickax to plant, to crumbly earthworm home. However, I think I need more nitrogen, so this coming spring I will try to get a load of manure. I suppose fish meal would work, and smell just as bad or worse? Is fish meal more or less expensive?