Should you Trim Back your Perennials This Fall?

 I’ve got an email, an emailer says,” should I cut back all my perennials, or is that not necessary?”

It’s perfectly okay to leave some of them. I usually kind of do my cleanup really early spring.You just want to make sure you’re not leaving it laying there, like, way into next year, as new things start to pop up, and everything. I mean, it is a good idea to trim things down now, as they go dormant, just because it’s going to keep things cleaner.

You’re not going to have debris blowing around, and you’re not getting leaves caught up in there, and that kind of stuff. But if you don’t get to some perennials this year, cutting them down, it’s perfectly okay to do it early spring before things start breaking dormancy.

And I’ve got a question from another email.  And this one says,” how do I proceed now that my cone flowers have died back? I want to have them more or less take over a flower bed if possible.”

So you could leave a lot of the seed heads on and just let them do their thing and dissipate on their own. Or you could cut the seed heads off and you can sprinkle them about. But all in all, you’re really not wanting to get rid of any of those. You kind of want to let it naturalize. 

You can really just let it go, to be honest. But you can cut it back if you want to clean it up, if it’s in something else or whatever, but just save those seed heads and you can just go ahead and sprinkle them around so they take over your flower bed like you were hoping. A lot of times, it is kind of nice to leave some on before you’re cutting things down, finches are eating the seeds. They’ll kind of just naturally open up and disperse on their own.

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