Beautiful fall foliage needs to be cleaned up to protect your lawn.

The first frosts have hit all around the country, with some people even experiencing record snowfall. The trees are bare, the annuals dead, the perennials sleeping, and surprisingly enough the camellias still blooming.

Now’s the time to do some cleanup in your garden, to be ready for next years display. First and foremost, if you have a lot of leaves covering either your garden or your lawn, you need to deal with them. You need to rake the leaves off the lawn, as they could pack down and kill the grass underneath. In the garden you need to rake the leaves so that they are off any evergreen plants. You may need to move some of them to more tender perennials to give them a “winter coat” against the cold. The best thing you can do with your overstock of leaves is to compost them. If you don’t have the space for that, try to ensure that they give picked up by a composting company. Many cities have composting services on certain dates. All you have to do is have the trees curbside so they can vacuum them up.

You should pull up dead annuals and compost them. With perennials you may want to leave some of the stalks intact to help hold leaves or other materials to help them stay warmer. Also, if they still have seeds on them you can leave them for the birds. It just depends on how messy you want your yard to look. Sometimes removing the dead stalks is needed.

Now is also a great time to put in, or amend, gardens. Tilling up the soil, when it is not too wet or frozen, can give you a head start in the spring. If you need to add amendments to sweeten or acidify the soil, doing it in the fall helps the soil to be ready for planting come spring. Your plants will thank you for it. Also, any compost, manures, etc, can be put in the gardens now and allowed to mellow through the winter. This will give your seedlings a tasty treat when you plant them.

Check to see when to trim back your shrubs and trees. Some of them should be done in the fall, others not until spring. So check, because you could cause less bloom and growth if you do it at the wrong time.