Some rules make me smile, like having permission to leave snowmen decor up all winter. Other rules make me feel like sloth, like the local yard rules.

Snow is a great strawberry mulch

I arrived here in early Nov 2014, and when I looked out on the gardens I saw that everything was orderly and ready for the winter. The previous family cleared the  veggie garden of all weeds, stubble, and debris of any kind. Nothing visible out there but a clear, flat garden space. The strawberries had a nice layer of leaves to keep them safe during the winter. The perennial flowers were trimmed down and the old stems raked out. The irises, likewise, were cut down to the surface. I wondered if everyone was so neat?

Yes! Everyone!. Many people here have a veggie garden and they all look the same at the end of the season: clear, neat, level, as if nothing ever grew there. All flower beds are trimmed, neat, orderly. Grass lawns never grow too long before a mowing. In the fall, only two or three leaves accumulate before the rake comes out.

My ideal front yard

Enter in a permaculture-kind-of-gal. I like flowers and veggies all mixed together. At my previous place, I let the crab apples lie where they fell all winter–food for the birds and compost for the lawn. I left many of my self-seeding flowers, including tall hollyhocks and bushy marigolds, stand all winter so that the seeds spread far and wide. The tall sunflowers stayed in place to provide food for the blue jays during the winter.  I raked the chunky garden debris each year into a huge pile that provided winter cover for small critters and left the iris leaves for the same reason. Any vines that climbed up the fence stayed to reduce wind damage to overwintering carrots and parsnips.  Everything else went into the compost piles. In the spring, flowers sprouted up in the sidewalk cracks and errant morning glories climbed up anything/everything. Hollyhocks took over my back yard. Be fruitful and multiply–my gardening style.

Up here, I cut down on the organic mayhem a bit to keep people from talking too much. The veggie garden is sort of clean. I put the tomato cages and other hardware in the shed. However, I did leave the sunflowers and zinnias for the birds. I did not cut down the raspberry bushes and some of the perennials stand where they flowered this past summer. I let the wind blow off the leaves that didn’t make it into a compost pile–perhaps the first ever in this small town. I inadvertently left a small pile of leaves (2 foot long, 8 inches high) accumulate in front of the garage, and a neighbor finally came by to bag them up. When the snow melted this week, I saw a Christmas wreath still hanging on a short fence in the front flower bed. That would be okay were it a snowman, but a Christmas wreath in late February!? This morning, I will grab it.

Nothing, however, will generate the kind of giddy talk that my garden lights caused this past spring. I planted early potatoes and carrots right before a cold snap. I learned long ago that old-style Christmas lights generate enough warmth to keep seeds and seedlings from freezing. So, I dug out my lights saved for that purpose and carefully laid them out on the ground, along the (raised) beds. I  plugged them into an extension cord each night. During an even colder snap, after things had germinated, I put 5-gallon buckets over small plants and shoved a few of the lights under each bucket. Everything thrived. However, this was the oddest thing ever sighted in this town. At night, cars drove down the alley to see the spectacle. People teased me endlessly, and a few seemed to think I had more sinister plans. To keep things lively, I confessed that the rows of lights were an alien landing strip.

 
Such fun, so many laughs. I admit that I like being a free-spirit in an orderly world. Keeps life interesting for everyone. Sometimes I feel bad for being “messy”, but I try to fight that off. I work hard to create my garden mayhem. I also seek to understand the outdoor tidiness of the locals. I am guessing that some of it is rooted in the farming traditions here. Plant debris can also harbor insect eggs/larvae and disease spores, and cleanliness on the isolated, labor-intensive homestead was probably a wise agricultural practice. People of German heritage were excellent small grain, bean and sunflower farmers and I can see how they brought their clean garden habits when they moved into town.

Wondering now, what garden scandals can I generate this year??