Tidy up the garden for winter

Shredded leaves make good mulch for your garden beds.

You can rent or purchase a shredder for the leaves and other small garden debris. These shredders tend to be noisy and slow. It takes a long time to generate a cubic yard of leaf mulch using a small shredder. Your lawn mower will also shred leaves, though not as finely as a shredder.

Ground up leaves decompose more quickly in a compost pile. I typically do not mulch established perennial borders but leave the perennials up for the winter and let some fall leaves blow in. This has more of a natural (not manicured) look that I prefer.

Cutting back your perennials and top-dressing the bed with a light layer of mulch results in a neat and tidy appearance. Established perennial borders do not need mulch for the winter.

To calculate the amount of mulch needed for a bed, first convert all measurements to feet. One foot equals 12 inches. To figure the square feet of a bed, multiply the length of the bed times the width. To convert the depth of mulch to feet, divide the inches of mulch you intend to apply by 12. If your mulch is to be 1 inch deep, take 1 divided by 12. This gives you a .08-foot depth of mulch.

Use the following formula to calculate the amount of mulch needed to cover a bed that is 18 feet wide by 37 feet long with 1 inch of mulch. Eighteen feet times 37 feet equals 666 square feet of bed space. One inch divided by 12 inches equals .08 foot. Six hundred sixty-six square feet times .08 foot of mulch equals 53 cubic feet of mulch. One cubic yard of mulch is 27 cubic feet, so divide 53 cubic feet by 27. Your order should be 2 cubic yards of mulch.

Bagged mulch comes in different sizes. Typically, the sizes are 2 or 3 cubic feet, which works well for small beds. For the bed above, you would divide the 53 cubic feet of mulch required by the amount of mulch in the bag; 53 cubic feet divided by 3 cubic feet per bag equals 18 bags, and 53 cubic feet divided by 2 cubic feet per bag equals 27 bags of mulch. For this bed, it will be less expensive to buy the mulch in bulk.

• Try pinning garden netting over freshly planted beds of bulbs to discourage chipmunks and squirrels from digging up the bulbs. This will not work when drifting bulbs into shrub and perennial borders, as the bulbs will be spread out over a larger area and existing plants will be in the way of the netting.

For these situations, try using a granular animal repellent applied over the area where the bulbs are planted. Remove the netting in early winter when the ground has frozen or in early spring. A light layer of mulch over the netting will help hide it.

Though this is not feasible on a large scale, small pockets of bulbs may be protected by covering with chicken wire underground to protect them from being dug up. The bulbs will grow through the chicken wire in spring.

• Remove frozen plants from containers and hanging baskets and replace them with evergreen boughs, branches with colorful berries, and interesting seed heads from perennials and ornamental grasses. Garden centers have lots of options to choose from for decorating your containers if you do not have materials available in your garden. Push ends of the stems into the growing medium in the container to support the branches.

• Tim Johnson is director of horticulture at Chicago Botanic Garden, chicagobotanic.org.