Don’t Let Your Garden Fade! 🍁 5 Easy Fall Gardening Tips

Think your garden's best days are over once fall hits? Think again. From fiery foliage to late season blooms to containers that steal the show, today I'm sharing my best tips to keep your garden looking stunning all autumn long. Hi, it's Steph, and fall isn't just for leaves and pumpkins. Today I'm going to share with you my top five tips for keeping your fall garden looking unforgettable, starting with transforming your containers with fall-ready perennials. Containers are the easiest way to make a big fall impact, and over recent years I've talked to many gardeners who are shifting away from using mums only in their fall arrangements in favor of using more perennials. I have been a huge fan of this for years, and I do it over and over again in my garden. I love it because perennials can last in containers a lot longer, and when you're done using them in the containers, you can find a home for them out in the garden. So I feel like it is really a budget-conscious way to create containers and to still have plants that you can utilize in other places later. One thing that I like to do in the fall is use a little bit of annuals, but mostly perennials, and I did this last season when I created a driveway planter. I had added a beautiful celosia in the center, a seasonal ornamental grass, and I tucked in plants like heuchera and tiarella, as well as some asters. So let me know in the comments, do you prefer to use perennials in your containers? Do you do a lot of it? I actually have started to do quite a bit of it, and I do still like to add a little bit of seasonal color. Specifically in the spring, I'll add a few pansies, which I think look really beautiful. I will start a couple of things from seed, like alyssum, which is super easy and looks really pretty. And in the fall, I also like to add things like nasturtium that you can start from seed. Pansies are also available, and petunias, which are a plant that many of us use in our summer containers, which can extend over into fall because they actually do like the cool temperatures of spring and fall. Another really great annual that you can use in your containers to provide a little bit of color along with your perennials are things like coleus. So there are lots of options when it comes to creating seasonal containers that don't just include mums in fall. You can certainly use things like heucheras and ferns, sedum, and ornamental grasses that are perennial. My personal favorite in containers is heconicloa, which is also known as Japanese forest grass. This is one that likes to be in the shade. So if you have a shady corner or garden in a shade area, that would make a great container option for you, paired with something like a fern and a coral bell or heuchera. In my fall display last season, I used some heucheras as a standalone in a planter. I also think it looks really beautiful when you use a single plant in a planter instead of doing a combo of plants. So you can certainly get a lot of impact by having multiple planters clustered together and having a single variety of perennial in each of those planters. So a tip with using perennials in your containers is that they must be at least two zones hardier than your growing zone. Any plant that you put in the ground has the insulation of the earth to keep it alive throughout the winter. However, when you plant it in a container, it's not as protected. So they have to be pretty hardy plants. And I've had no issue with heucheras coming back, the Japanese forest grass, as well as ferns. Something else I really like to use in my containers are evergreens. They provide a year round color and you can add seasonal pops of color with annuals. Things like mums and pansies or even trailing plants. I actually happen to have a couple of boxwood planted by my back door on my patio that I under-planted with some creeping jenny. And sometimes I even tuck in some alyssum and I think it looks really pretty. And I have color all year round with the evergreen. So let me know, are you planning on using some mums in your containers this fall or are you planning on adding more seasonally appropriate perennials? Late season bloomers. This is really important to keep a garden that blooms from spring all the way through fall. And this is something that I have been working on in my own garden for the last couple of seasons and it's really beginning to pay off. I have planted different varieties of sedums and ornamental grasses. Joe pieweed and anemones. Last season I added ironweed and asters and some true perennial mums. And I'm really loving the way it's turning out. I have blooms non-stop through October, which is a really difficult task to achieve. And you don't have to just use blooms to keep the interest going in your garden. You can also use foliage plants. Things like heuchera and brunnera, lungwort, as well as lamb's air. There are so many beautiful textural plants that provide a lot of interest and color just through the use of foliage. And don't be afraid to add color with some annuals that will keep the color show going until the fall. They're a great way to fill in some gaps when your perennials start to look tired. You can do this with zinnias, marigolds, cosmos, and even sunflowers. In fact, this season I planted some suncredible yellow sunflowers up and down my walkway and they are looking beautiful as we transition into fall. Remember to layer your plants for color and texture and to add varying foliage colors. It really makes your garden more dynamic and visually interesting. Ornamental grasses. They are such an underrated plant for the perennial garden. They provide a lot of texture and vertical interest. They are such a beautiful plant for graceful movement and softness and elegance in the garden. And they come in so many different varieties, so you're sure to find something that will fit in your garden. They come in taller varieties and shorter, some wider, some thinner. And they also come with different bloom habits. And grasses do bloom. At the end of the summer, beginning of the fall, they will send up some seed heads. Some of them have a looser seed head. Some of them have plumes. But they're all so beautiful. My favorite variety that I grow in my garden for a taller grass is the Calamagratis Carl Forrester reed grass. It is a more compact grass. It stands about four feet in height and only about two to three feet in diameter. They look really impactful and beautiful planted in drifts. And as we get to the end of the summer, they start pushing up their plumes, which look like straw or wheat, which is very seasonally appropriate. And I just love the way that they move in the breeze. I also really like a shorter stature fountain grass, plants like the hamlin and the bunny grass. I feel that they're really beautiful. They get those plumes at the end of the summer, which also catch the light and make them look like they're glowing. They especially look beautiful paired with plants like sedum. And I have that in one of my borders. And I really love the combination. I've also had them planted with lambs ear and the textural difference also looks really beautiful together. Dramatic foliage trees. Nothing signals fall like vibrant foliage. And there are so many beautiful trees that you can choose to add fall color to your garden. Most notably maples. There is the October glory maple or in my case, I grow lots of Japanese maples. I have a whole collection of them and I absolutely love them. I have one specific tree that provides a lot of vibrant red color. It is the dancing peacock Japanese maple. But there are several other trees that also provide really beautiful and vibrant fall color. Dogwoods, for example, get beautiful red fall color. Eastern redbuds get golden color. Ginkgos turn a very bright yellow. What other trees can you think of that offer really beautiful fall color? Let us know in the comments. You want to choose varieties that get deep reds and oranges and golden yellow colors in the fall and position them in your garden in an area that will make it a focal point, either in a front yard or in a backyard that you can see out a window. When looking for trees for your garden, try to find trees that have multiple seasons of interest. Whether it is blooms in the spring or vibrant fall color or even peeling bark that you can enjoy in the winter, by having trees with multiple seasons of interest, you are sure to enjoy that specimen for years to come. Fall shrubs with multi-season interest. Shrubs extend garden interest from fall all the way through winter and there are so many beautiful options for late season shrubs. Some of my personal favorites are hydrangeas. They look absolutely stunning as they continue to go through color changes from mid to late summer all the way through fall. They go through various shades of pink and just look absolutely stunning. Beautyberry. It also happens to be native. It also blooms and at the end of September, beginning of October, it will give me these clusters of purple berries that is absolutely beautiful. Ninebark. These are a great shrub. They're also native. They have these beautiful dark leaves. I have a couple of varieties in my garden. A smaller variety is the Tiny Wine Ninebark by Proven Winners. It has these large clusters of blooms in the spring and then you get this dark foliage throughout the rest of the season and in the winter when all of the foliage has dropped you have a peeling bark. So it is a really beautiful shrub. I also have the Ginger Wine Ninebark which has a really dark foliage with a hint of orange in the sunlight. It is stunning. So a Ninebark again will give you multiple seasons of interest with the spring blooms, the colorful dark foliage, as well as a peeling bark in winter. Heptacodium is a newer one that I've added to my garden that also has a really long season of interest. It'll get large shiny leaves in spring. It'll have these beautiful white blooms in the later part of summer and even after the white blooms fade the calyxes or the bracts that hold on to those blooms will turn a fiery shade of red. It is absolutely gorgeous. Multi-season shrubs are really hot right now because gardeners want plants that do it all, provide beautiful blooms, pollinator support, and winter interest. While it's not the easiest to have a beautiful fall garden, I hope that these five tips showed you that it is possible. So let me know in the comments what was your favorite tip that you took away from this video. Thank you so much for spending your time with me and I'll catch you in the next one.