Is it worth or even beneficial to tidy up the garden?

I'm looking out, it's damp and dampish.
There are dead things dotted about and things could be pulled out of containers with little effort.
However.... You could do the same thing late February/ early March.
Do you ignore your garden over winter or make it nice and neat?

 

Mainly ignore it but sometimes tidy the front garden a bit.

 

Our garden is suffering the same symptoms this year partly due to the wet weather, but also I have nowhere to put the green waste as the bin men are on strike. For the first time I'm leaving it and hoping it will shrivel up a bit.

 

Definitely leave, dead things offer shelter and sometimes food for critters, and any bare patch of soil will happily host weeds as soon as they get going.

Leaving things in also keeps the soil a bit more open which is another positive point on heavy clay. Once the remnants are pulled out in spring it's easy to fluff and top things up.

Just call it "eco mulch with winter interest".

Regarding pots with dead summer stuff, they do look a bit unsightly so I usually push them into a corner. A well stocked tatty corner is gardener's pride

 

It takes very little time to tidy up in the spring.
I leave mostly everything.
I like how the patio and the nearby borders can look neatish after a few minutes 'weeding and a bit of a prune.

 

Agree re keeping the organic matter, even if a bit ugly, for creatures and mulch. I look forward to doing a tidy about March and revealing little green shoots coming up. A prize at the end of Winter.

 

You're dead right @AuntyRach

 

It mainly depends on your type of garden.
I have a wild area that get a rough tidy up and a bit of tree pruning.

Having said that I don't actually have a really tidy part either, so mostly just sort out things as I go along, its too wet to actually do much that makes a big difference IMO, but I do clear obviously dead stuff.

 

Hi

depends on the weather I always clean the patio just from a slip hazard.

 

Most of the plants in my garden are either evergreens or grasses so they remain all year, apart from in late February when I cut all the deciduous grasses down to the ground. I let most of the perennials that I grow remain for winter if they look good and offer food and/or shelter for wildlife but I chop down anything that becomes slushy and a potential attraction for slugs, snails or other pests or diseases. I remove fallen leaves from the lawn, paths and selectively from crowns of plants but let others remain to break down naturally. I also use bark as a mulch in some borders, to protect plant roots over winter and keep weeds away. Leaving foliage, seedheads and berries in situ to provide food and shelter for wildlife also helps to retain winter interest. The garden would be a desolate place without this, for me anyway. It doesn’t take long to remove all the remaining dead stems and seedheads in spring.

 

The consensus these days is that it is better to leave. There are a handful of exceptions of course. Hellebores appreciate Winter pruning of old foliage and I have read somewhere what @Plantminded has mentioned above, that plants that become slushy e.g. hostas are bad in relation to slugs, so I have removed their foliage specifically. Regarding fallen leaves, in theory my approach is to relocate the ones which end up on the lawn / gravel / patio to the borders but to be honest I haven't been keeping up with that fully (it's cold, wet, I have just gone through another cold and I've been busy with other things).

 

Well our garden is certainly a wild one. We leave plants that have seeded until there aren't any left so that the birds are able to take what they can. The autumn leaves we leave as long as possible but once they are over the paths then they are collected and used for the tree ferns/compost. We do cut back shrubs that are (in our garden so often) taking over the paths.

 

I just leave my garden alone in the winter, but maybe I'm not such a control freak as some people are.

 

I'm a semi cleaner upper. I remove things that would be in the way or that might cause problems but don't cut things back that don't need it. Nature hates bare soil.
I cut back the jerusalem artichokes down our allotment the other day and the leaves were full of ladybirds. I put the stems to once side in a sheltered spot where the bugs can over winter.

The one bit of advice I don't really understand is when people say to leave things until feb/March for wildlife. If we hack things back then, it's normally still to cold for anything to really get going so it perhaps make no real difference if we cut it back now but don't remove the material from the garden, like with the artichokes.

 

@Thevictorian .
To me, it's like 'no now May'. What happens on the first of June? Better than nothing -but not much.