October Planting

It is October and that means planting time in mid-Michigan. While it may be harvest time for our vegetable gardens and farm fields, now is a great time to plant shrubs, trees, and perennials for next year. Fall gives the plants time to get their roots established without combatting punishing summer heat.

What to plant? Native species in my yard have been doing wonderfully, even through the heat and droughts of the past summers. For shrubs, I love the oak-leaf hydrangeas, which the deer do not eat and which has needed no pruning or special care, and have beautiful creamy cones of flowers that slowly turn pink as the season progresses. Service berries have beautiful early spring delicate white blooms that turn into berries birds love, but the bunnies will eat the stems
so we cage their base to protect them. Nine-barks have a range of colors in their leaves, lovely flower clusters, are very drought tolerant, and also are completely ignored by deer and rabbits. These all like some sun, but can tolerate partial shade too. We also have some American hazelnuts growing, which produced a couple of delicious hazelnuts for us! We will be adding oak leaf hydrangeas, another nine-bark, and another hazelnut to our yard this fall.
 

Recent native trees we have added include an American plum, which blooms beautifully in spring and produces rather tart plums in the fall, and a prairie fire crabapple, which blooms hot pink in spring and is now laden with its fruit. Redbuds bloom a lovely pink in the spring and pair well with our native dogwood. These are all small trees, and one wants to be sure when adding trees and shrubs that they will fit where they have been planted. But the native trees also need little care once established and serve the local pollinators and wildlife well.
 

The full beauty of the garden, though, comes from planting perennials so that one bloom follows from another throughout the year. Spring ephemerals (like rue anenome) are followed by creeping phlox, with blankets of color in May. Garden sage (salvias) follow, and although many varieties are not native, they are not aggressive spreaders (they are not invasive) and my bumblebees adore them. Monardas (bee balm) in a range of colors follow. We have fuschia, red, violet, lavender, and pink monardas all blooming in June. By July, the echinaceas (cone flower) and asclepius (butterflyweed and milkweed) are taking center stage. The echinaceas now come in a wide range of colors that the bees love, and the birds will appreciate the seed heads in the fall. Asclepius is crucial for supporting Monarch butterfly populations. Next come the rudbeckias (black-eyed susans), creating blankets of gold flowers. By September, the asters,
goldenrod, and sedums are blooming and the center of pollinator activity, providing blooms well into the fall.
 

This panalopy works well for sunny gardens and, like most perennial gardens, is drought resistant. (I also love cardinal flowers, but they need the soil to be a bit wetter and so don’t do as well with our increasing drys spells.) At this point, I am not adding perennials to my garden—I will instead be splitting perennials off to share with neighbors.
 

For planting, I always dig a hole bigger than the root ball (or pot), add some scoops of good compost, fill with water, then tuck the plant in, loosening the roots in the rich slurry. After filling the hole back in, I top dress with an inch of compost and water well.

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For shadier gardens, the cast of seasonal characters is different (including columbine, wild ginger, bleeding hearts, native violets, woodland poppies, and coral bells) but the story is the same—one bloom follows another, marking the passage of the seasons. The rich tapestry is a lovely feast for both human senses and native pollinators. Fall is the best time to start weaving such a tapestry, for you to enjoy next year!