Fall is compost time

They look nothing like pennies from heaven but copper-colored leaves dropping to the ground all around us are just as valuable and a lot easier to handle. Every autumn leaf is welcome — brown, red, yellow, or even green, for that matter. We should be delighted to have them delivered right to our gardens.

If you’ve always considered falling leaves more of a nuisance than a gift from above, then you haven’t been turning them into black gold — compost. This is the perfect time of year to start a compost pile. It takes little time and work and you can even count raking as exercise. With a little more effort, you could take the preparation a step further and run a lawn mower over the leaves for faster decomposition before piling them up.

A simple mound in a corner of the back yard is the easiest and most basic method of creating leaf compost, but adding other chopped garden debris, lawn clippings and kitchen scraps makes a more nutritious mixture — for the microorganisms doing the work and eventually for improving soil and nurturing plants. Just keep the pile moist until ample rainfall does that for you, stir it every week or two in the coming months to ensure that moisture is penetrating evenly, then wait until spring to reap the rewards.

Once you use your own compost and experience the results it brings to the soil, you’ll want to keep the process going year round.

If anything is better than compost, it’s worm castings. Again this summer, I witnessed their near magic after I worked a scoopful into containers and even more around sad-looking plants in the ground. Within a week, all rebounded with new growth; within a month they were quite robust.

You can purchase bags of worm compost at some nurseries, but the best value locally is from Gene Adams’ Moon Mountain Worm Farm (546-6041) off rural Bennett Valley Road, where you can buy it by the bucketful.

If you have some compost or worm castings on hand now, mix a handful into the planting hole as you put bulbs in the ground. What? You’re not planting bulbs?

BULBS GALORE

Nearly every hardware and grocery store sells bulbs, but there are far more choices from mail-order suppliers that you can find online.

My preference is www.BrentandBeckysbulbs.com where you can order directly, download or request a paper catalog. Even more helpful than the illustrative catalog photos is a chart that groups bulbs according to flowering time, garden placement, water and other cultural needs, and suitability for containers or cutting.

The search engine on the Web site allows you to choose parameters that fit your personal garden design, such as color, rock garden varieties or flowering time.

Tulips are one of the most sought-after spring-flowering bulbs but are often disappointing for novice gardeners because most are annuals rather than perennials. For multiple years of bloom, plant Darwin hybrids, which are also suitable for forcing and are long-lasting in flower. But if they are winter-forced, they won’t store enough energy to rebloom the following year and should be discarded after petals drop.

PLANTING TIPS

Instead of giving each bulb room to grow and setting them some distance apart, you will achieve a more pleasing effect by crowding them together.

When daffodils, for instance, are spaced 6 to 12 inches apart, they look oddly sparse in flower for many years until bulbs mature enough to fill the intervening space. Setting them “shoulder-to-shoulder” with 5 to 8 in a clump and clumps spaced every 12 to 18 inches apart renders a far more pleasing spring scene.

Always follow package directions for planting bulbs, setting them, in general, 2 to 3 times as deep as their height. If you followed that guideline when you planted daffodils several years ago and find that they’ve worked their way to the surface, replant them in their original spot or use a few to begin a new clump.

FUND-RAISER WORKSHOP

Those gardeners who would like to attract beneficial insects and other helpful garden denizens have the opportunity to learn how to do just that at a workshop on Saturday, October 25 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Sonoma State University. You’ll also be helping out young learners since the workshop is a fund-raiser for the Entomology Education and Outreach Program, which provides presentations for local school gardens and classrooms for grades K-8 and other groups.

This multi-media presentation will include a close-up look with high-quality microscopes at some of the insects that keep gardens healthy, PowerPoint lectures, and museum and garden tours. Presenters are landscape designer and consultant Kate Frey and Frederique Lavoipierre, coordinator of the SSU Entomology Outreach program and director of the SSU Sustainable Landscape Program.

For details on location, parking, and remitting the $35 fee, contact Frederique (lavoipie@sonoma.edu, 829-0751).

Rosemary McCreary, a Sonoma County gardener, gardening teacher and author, writes the weekly Homegrown column for The Press Democrat. Write to her at P.O. Box 910, Santa Rosa, 95402; or send fax to 521-5343.