A friend of mine recently revealed her husband was worried about their western red cedar trees. You see, he’d noticed areas of orange foliage dotted throughout the canopy and thought they were dying.
I told her to tell him to relax. When sections of old cedar foliage lose their green color in the late summer through fall, it’s just a normal part of their growth cycle called flagging.
Soon they’ll slough off and you’ll have more important things to worry about, like raking them up and disposing of them, especially after a big storm.
You could dump them in your compost pile, along with all the needles from the Douglas firs that shed like Shetland sheep dogs shed hair, but they take a long time to compost.
This is true for most native conifers because of the waxy coating on their needles. Cedars are even more resistant to rot because of the anti-microbial oils in their tissues that inhibit decomposing bacteria and fungi.
Because of this, I keep a compost pile for my garden waste that produces several wheelbarrow loads of good compost every year, but small branches and evergreen windfall go in another pile to slowly break down over time.
Much, much later, I’ll incorporate it into my garden. In addition, I use worm bins for my kitchen waste.
As you can see, I don’t expect rapid returns on my composting investments and am perfectly happy to have a staring contest with Mother Nature.
Of course, there are ways you can make those cedar flags work for you. I consider it a happy accident that they come down right about the time I’m planting my garlic.
Now is the perfect time to get it in the ground to winter over and eventually harvest large, delicious cloves in July. Garlics appreciate a good layer of mulch to both suppress weeds and protect the cloves from temperature extremes that could cause soil heaving.
If you don’t have an excess of windfall to use as mulch, straw or leaves will work just fine. If you’ve got one of our native big leaf maples nearby, you’re sure to have enough leaves to bury an old Studebaker, let alone a row or two of garlic.
If you live in amongst the trees like I do, you can take a holistic approach to fall clean-ups and leave a bit of the dreck that accumulates beneath your evergreens in place.
This stuff can help prevent soil erosion and, just like for your garlics, act as a mulch to keep weeds down and water from evaporating. It can also help protect tree roots that have grown up onto the surface of the soil from repeatedly getting nicked by over-zealous lawn mowing.
This is assuming you don’t want to try to actually grow lawn under those conifers instead of letting them do what trees in the wild have a tendency to do: build up the forest floor.
If you‘ve been trying to grow lawn amongst the big trees, you’ve probably noticed some difficulties in that regard.
Shade is part of the problem, since most turf grass requires a lot of direct, not dappled, sunlight, but there’s also the issue of competition between the species.
Contrary to popular belief, most of a tree’s roots are fanned out near the surface of the soil – right where your lawn is going to want that water and those nutrients the trees are busy soaking up.
And then there’s the problem with moss. But that’s another story. For some it’s a really sad one too.
