Seasonal Rituals Include Leaving the Leaves

We’ve been haphazardly prepping for winter these last couple of weeks—putting the storm windows up in the porch but not bothering to lower the combinations in the rest of the house, harvesting the last of the almost-ripe tomatoes and peppers before the recent frost, but neglecting the houseplants that are still outdoors.

I used to just bring in the plants without repotting them, leaving that task for late winter when new growth starts. Then a couple of years in a row, we encountered a few stink bugs, one at a time, in the house during winter. One would fly about aimlessly, sometimes startling us but never actually getting into anything; we would refer to it as “our friend,” and generally leave it alone, understanding that the “stink” moniker only pertains if you squish it or otherwise mess with it. After a couple of days, it would disappear; then I would find it on its back on a shelf, legs curled. A few days later another one would appear.

I surmised that they must be emerging from the soil of a houseplant that had been outside; so, last fall, I either repotted plants before bringing them in, or took cuttings. We had no stink bug friends in the house last winter. Even though they were kind of amusing, we don’t miss them.

We do rake leaves, but don’t bag them because they shelter beneficial insects, including butterflies and fireflies, mostly as eggs, chrysalids, or hibernating larvae. We deposit the leaves onto gardens and under shrubs. The shrubs more or less hold them in place; the garden beds get a little help from a few branches we place over the leaves to keep them from blowing away.

The more I learn about the diverse ways in which nearly all insects are beneficial—even if simply as food for birds—the less cleaning up of the garden we do. The tomato, pepper, and cucumber plants we’ll lay atop the full compost bin (we have two, side-by-side) until late spring, because their stems could also be habitat for insects. Once the nights are warm enough for tiny critters to have escaped, we’ll chop up the stringy vines to speed decomposition, or just transfer them to the bottom of the empty bin to slowly break down over the summer.

Craig strung up lights around our yard this weekend, before it gets so cold the task becomes cumbersome by the necessity of wearing gloves. For several years we kept strings of lights by the patio lit through summer, too, but then I learned that they disorient the fireflies in their nocturnal search for mates, so now we unplug them in May. I rather like the ritual of turning on the decorative outdoor lights as the season changes, providing something cheerful and colorful to see out the windows as night comes earlier and earlier.

We visited our neighborhood garden center on Monday to pick up a couple of pumpkins, decorative gourds, and a bag of potting soil. After carving the pumpkins, planting a few more tulip bulbs, and potting up the houseplants that haven’t succumbed to frost yet, we’ll leave the garden and all its tiny companions to nestle in for their long winter nap.