Have an urge to ‘clean up’ your garden? Stop! Put down the clippers. There’s another way.

If you are getting ready to clean up your summer garden, I have a tip that will make next year’s garden better, provide you with food all winter long and save you a lot of time and expense:

Don’t. 

In the best of all possible worlds, your vegetable garden would mimic nature’s example.  Leaves fall and decompose. Plants produce seeds that sprout next spring. Growth continues until the weather makes it stop — not necessarily when the calendar flips to October or November.

Our growing season slows down as temperatures drop, and sunshine decreases, but growth never fully stops — especially now that we have a more Californian climate.

There are many frost sensitive plants like tomatoes, beans and corn that will keep growing and producing until they are killed by sub-freezing temperatures. 

The crop will be smaller, with more slug holes in it, but a BLT is possible in November, and fresh broccoli is likely all winter long.

And that winter broccoli will come from the plants you put in last spring. Just keep picking off the stalks with yellow blossoms, and harvesting the little florets — yum!

Cabbage harvested in midsummer will be bringing four or five sweet mini-heads to maturity in the next month — if you left the root of the plant in after cutting that first head off earlier this year. Those bonus heads are sweeter and also perfect for making a fall batch of sauerkraut.

Many greens will be more compromised by slugs and rain than by cold — especially if they are growing in a part of your yard that gets some winter sunshine. Lettuce will be devoured, but arugula, mustard, sorrel, radicchio and lots of other greens will produce salads all winter long.

Eating is great, but my real counterintuitive gardening advice is to leave as many of your dead plants to decompose right in the yard as possible. If you had a diseased plant, removing it could be a good idea, but it is probably not necessary — or effective. The spores of late blight and powdery mildew are already in the soil, waiting. It is unlikely (nay, impossible!) for you to pick them all up. 

And you have friends who will do much of your garden clean-up for free. Area birds are great at finding hidden morsels on the vegetable plants and at finding insects, some of which may have been causing damage to your crops.

Many of the nutrients used by your plants to grow this summer are locked up in the stems and leaves of the spent crops.

Allowing them to decompose on site will release the valuable materials back into the soil. If you haul everything away in a clean-up frenzy, you will have to haul something back to replace it.  

A pile of tomato vines, corn stalks and squash plants covered with leaves will decompose over the winter, although some things — corn stalks in particular — may not turn back into soil until next summer. It’s fine to have some partially decomposed organic matter on the ground around next year’s tomatoes. It will help conserve water next summer.

Using your spent crops and fall weeds is a great way to add fertility and organic matter to your soil over the winter. Throw the weeds and leftover vegetable plants down, cover them with cardboard, and then put a foot or more of leaves over the top. If you have areas that need extra fertility, some feather meal, seed meal or alfalfa pellets can be put on the cardboard before the leaves.

Call it a lasagna compost or sheet mulch.

So if you can’t stop the fall clean-up urge, I want you to put down the clippers. Now back away from the broccoli plants. No sudden moves to pull up the green beans that are still producing. You’ll thank me for this intervention during dinner in December.