…Hold off on that spring garden cleanup
If you’re like me, longer days and warming temperatures have you thinking about getting outside and starting the annual spring garden cleanup.
But don’t – at least not yet! The remnants of last year’s garden may look like a mess to us, but consider:
- Dead plant materials and topsoil are winter homes to a lot of beneficial insects, notably bees
- Those insects often don’t wake up and emerge until temperatures get considerably warmer
- Early cleanup can destroy insect habitat and harm those helpful insects
So what to do? If possible:
- Wait until temperatures are consistently at least 10°C before you clean up your garden
- Be selective: leave some leaf litter for the insects – in low-visibility areas of your garden if you don’t like how it looks
- Use leaf mould or compost (insect-friendly) instead of heavier wood chip mulches (insect-unfriendly) around your plants, and delay application until it’s warm so that insects that overwinter underground can emerge first
- Some bees overwinter in the natural cavities of dead stalks and grasses, so wait until as late as possible to remove them from your garden. If you can’t wait, bundle up those stems and store them nearby so any late-waking bees can still emerge. (Those stems may also become summer habitat for the bees.)
If you want to go a step further and make your garden a haven for bees and other pollinators:
- Set aside a corner of your garden for pollinator favourites like yarrow, bee balm, spirea, coneflowers, liatris and milkweed (discover more options at your local garden center)
- Build a bee house like this one, or simply drill holes of various sizes 10-15 cm deep into the end of a stick of wood, to create a hospitable habitat for our pollinator friends
Hello spring, and happy gardening – just not quite yet!
Thanks to subscribers Nicole McLaughlin and Don Ross for the social media posts that inspired this Green Ideas subject!
In the news:
Over 400 Olympic athletes sign a letter urging the International Olympic Committee to make climate change its top priority.
Wow – launch of Toyota’s new $15,000 EV in China was so popular it crashed the server, with over 10,000 sales in the first hour!
Record-breaking renewables: so far this month, Texas has set new records for the most wind production ever (28,470 megawatts), the most solar production ever (25,015 megawatts), and greatest battery discharge into the grid ever (4,955 megawatts, a seven-fold increase over just two years ago)! For perspective, New Brunswick’s grid on a cold winter day is about 3,000 megawatts.
Quotable:
“Our fossil fuel addiction is a Frankenstein’s monster, sparing nothing and no one. All around us, we see clear signs that the monster has become master.”
-UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, January 22, 2025