With cooler weather on its way, harvesting and cleaning up your garden beds should be on your fall agenda. While your garden might not be actively producing over the winter, there’s still plenty to do now to make next season more good luck. Taking some time to properly prepare for the garden’s dormant season will mean a better start in the spring when it’s time to plant.

Harvest these things before the first frost

To button up this year’s crop, make sure to harvest all of your delicate veggies and seeds, and pick herbs before the first frost hits. In cooler climates, or higher elevations, that will be earlier in the season, while warmer places might get another month or two of frost-free evenings. Vegetables like squash, tomatoes, and lettuce aren’t hardy and will spoil if the temperature drops below freezing. However,

THE 19TH-CENTURY POET Minnie Aumonier once wrote, “When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden.” Turns out this slightly treacly sentiment, found on countless garden mugs and Pinterest boards, is rooted in a deeper truth, one that Sue Stuart-Smith, UK-based psychiatrist, psychotherapist, researcher and gardener, explores in her 2020 book, “The Well -Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature.”

The book, a meaty volume combining personal interviews and social science studies, reveals how connecting with nature nourishes and grounds us, instilling a sense of shelter and safety even if (when) the world around us is fraught. Stuart-Smith begins with a look at tending and examines how the process of gardening, even the tedious routine and weedy bits, helps to restore our physical, emotional and even spiritual equilibrium. “A long session in the garden can leave you feeling dead on your feet but strangely renewed

DULUTH — Glensheen’s formal garden has reopened after more than a year of extensive restoration work.

Duluth’s historic mansion museum announced the reopening in

a Facebook post Friday,

adding that admissions to the grounds will be a discounted $5 on Saturday, Sept. 3 and Sunday, Sept. 4.

The project, on the Lake Superior side of the mansion, was the result of $4 million in state bonding funds approved in 2018.

“This project has been a long time in the making and couldn’t have happened without the support of so many people, from legislators to construction staff and more,”

Glensheen said in a Facebook post Friday.

“Our mission at Glensheen is to celebrate preservation, and by completing this critical project while also restoring the gardens to an earlier design and planting plan, we are doing just that.”

A view of the Juneau Community Garden’s plots. (Photo courtesy of Jasz Garrett/KINY)

Juneau, Alaska (KINY) – Saturday from 11 am to 1:30 pm was the Community Garden’s first Harvest Fair since the pandemic; it includes live music, prizes, a farmer’s market, and a garden tour.

The Juneau Community Garden is located out by Skater’s Cabin, just past the Juneau Gun Range.

The board consists of around 8 people, and there is a long waitlist to join, Sharon Fleming said.

“It’s a 10 x 20 plot, and some people have more than one plot. Anyone can apply on the website or email the community garden email to apply to be on the waitlist. We’ve had a waitlist going for a couple of years, I think.”

To apply for a garden plot, go to www.juneaucommunitygarden.org.

Cynthia Krehbiel is the event coordinator on the Juneau Community Garden Board.

Sharon Fleming talked

HONOLULU (KHON2) — A botanical garden on the Windward side popularized by social media may soon implement a reservation system to manage the influx of visitors.

Hoomaluhia Botanical Gardens is nestled beneath the majestic Koolau Mountain range in Kaneohe. Its popularity has grown exponentially since the pandemic according to Daniel Babbitt, the program specialist there.

“We’ve increased by three-fold, from under 200,000 to 600,000 in just the last few years,” Babbitt explained.

He said they see an average of 2,000 to 3,000 people visit every day, rain or shine, and it’s taking a toll.

“It’s a strain on how we can do programming and parking and just the infrastructure on the garden.”

One of the reasons Babbitt said visitorship skyrocketed is because of photos posted on social media of the area at the entrance to the gardens.

“We’ve had to make some rule

SEATTLE (AP) — By the time you read this story, what it describes will probably have disappeared beneath the waves.

That’s how it was meant to be — and how it used to be.

Since time immemorial, as the saying goes, people in what is now Washington and British Columbia farmed the sea with a type of environmental engineering called clam gardening.

Around the time Europeans showed up here, the practice was lost.

“It was stolen from us,” Swinomish Tribal Senator Alana Quintasket told KUOW. “All of our teachings, all of our practices, our connections to this place, our connections to each other, our connections to all living things was stolen from us with settler colonialism.”

Quintasket stood in the mud where Skagit Bay becomes Kiket Island.

“We’re working hard to restore these practices, to bring back these teachings, and to restore our relationships,” she said.

A few dozen people

In a recent New York Times articlelong time flower gardener Jenny Rose Carey proclaimed that when it comes to flowers, “September is the new May.” Each year, she visits fall gardens around the country to see what’s still in bloom in September, then applies what she learned in her home garden.

Carey’s strategy involves year-round proactive garden maintenance—in other words, going beyond caring for the flowers and plants that are currently in-season, and working ahead to optimize future growth in her garden.

The rest of us may not be that methodical, but could probably benefit from doing a bit of proactive maintenance. If you’re not sure what, exactly, to do in the garden this month, here’s a September garden checklist that might help.

September garden checklist

All gardens are different, so these tasks may not all apply to yours. But generally speaking, here’s

During Japan’s feudal age, the favorite duck hunting ground for the successive lords of Kumamoto Castle and their warrior entourage was a spring-fed pond about one ri (four kilometers) southeast of the castle.

In the 1630s, Tadatoshi Hosokawa (1586-1641), the latest of the daimyo feudal lords of the castle, one of the finest on the island of Kyushu, decided he wanted more leisure pleasure from this site. He sponsored the establishment of a Buddhist temple to the north of the pond and had a teahouse, Kokindenju no Mabuilt on the pond’s western shore.

Over the generations, Tadatoshi and his heirs continued to develop the area around the pond, molding it into an elegant strolling garden (kaiyushiki teien) in the finest samurai tradition.

Today that garden is known as Suizenji Jojuen, taking its name from that Buddhist temple of centuries ago. (The temple no longer exists.) The garden