Putting the garden to bed - or not
There seems to be two completely different viewpoints among gardeners around how to put the garden to bed in the fall.
Some people believe the best thing is to clean everything up -- pull up all plants and compost/discard them and leave the beds bare over the winter. The logic to this that plant debris can provide a place for cutworms and other garden pests to over-winter and it houses plant diseases and fungal spores that can then grow and infect plants the following growing season.
Other believe that leaving plants in place for pollinators and other beneficial insects and wildlife is the way to go, and that cleaning up plant debris in the spring is less work as they pull up from the ground more easily.
I think both points of view are valid, but I tend to follow the latter where I mostly leave things in place. I do tend to pull up plants the habitually get powdery mildew or blight -- such as tomatoes and squashes -- and I burn or throw them away. I don't compost diseased plants because I'm 99% sure that blight and mildew and such can easily live in the compost pile over the winter, and I have no desire to spread diseases over my soil in the spring. I also like supporting the cavity-nesting bees and seed-eating birds by leaving up perennial stalks over the winter; and the rabbits, which I do not like, will eat the leaves and stalks of most of the veggie plants and will leave rabbit poo behind as they are doing so. Rabbit manure is some of the best fertilizer there is, so I think this arrangement works out quite well for all concerned.
The only raking I do in the fall is for the purpose of gathering leaves that I want to put as a mulch around perennials or in my compost. I don't have many leaves fall in my yard, and I use a lot of leaves throughout the year to alternate with food scraps in my compost pile -- and especially in the spring when I mulch around veggies such as potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, squash, etc.
So in the fall I solicit bagged leaves from neighbors who, for some reason, are trying to get rid of their leaves. (Weirdos). Because the leaf market is in my favor, I can be choosy and I ask for leaves that have been mowed and bagged, so that what I get is chopped up and spreads nicely around plants and breaks down well in the compost pile. I have several people on my list from NextDoor so that now I just message them directly to see when they are ready to let me come and grab bagged leaves from their steps or boulevard or whatever. I generally end up with about 8 full size garbage bags of leaves in the fall.
In the spring, as soon as most nights are well-above freezing, I put out my reinforced-concrete bird bath and circulating water spout/pump to entice the birds. I keep this going until November when we start to drop below freezing for more than a 3-4 hours in a row, when I empty it and put in away in the porch.
And so sometime in late October or November I get out a not-so-visually appealing metal bowl and bird bath heater coil and put that out in the same spot so that the birds (and other wildlife) have water throughout the winter. The heater just clips on the bowl and has a cord which I plug into the same outlet I use for the water pump in the summer. I put a brick in the bowl so that the birds have a larger surface to stand on, as they mostly use the water for drinking and not bathing. It seems strange, but I've read in more than one place that birds often need to bathe even in cold weather in order to fluff up their feathers to stay warm. I leave the decision up to them -- I just make the water available.
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