Goodbye last year's grasses

I really hate doing it, but it's time to cut down the ornamental grasses. I put this task off as long as possible each year for a few different reasons. First, I love the look of the large grasses during the winter -- their textures, colors. Second, they provide a good deal of privacy for my yard, as well as shelter for birds and other critters. Third, cutting them down is a lot of work.

But there comes a time when the new growth is ready to emerge, so the dead parts must go. I did this over the weekend when it was sunny, warm, and dry. Ideally I would have done it on a cooler day because it requires long sleeves and long pants for protection from the sharp grasses, but too warm is better than too cold I guess.

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I'm going to focus on these two large planting beds because they contain a lot of grasses as well as many perennials and annuals that also need to be cleaned up. Here's another look:

Usually I cut the large Miscanthus grasses down with my loppers, but I'm going to try something different this year. First, I tried tying the grass up, which I read would make it easier to cut and clean up:

How well did this work? Let me put it this way... I have five of these large grasses to cut down, and I tied up only the first one. It was too difficult to get the strap/rope around the plant, and it really didn't help with cleanup. The other thing I did differently this year:

I used the chainsaw.

Perhaps you might think this is overkill. To that I say you cut my grasses down with loppers -- I'll be using the chainsaw from now on! It made the process so much easier.

Until I hit a bit of chicken wire and had to loosen the chain to remove it. Other than that little mishap, it was great!

I was sad to cut this one down, as it looks so good next to the green of the bamboo:

And its curly seed heads are so nice! When I think about it though, I'd rather have the lovely green of the new grass blades, and cutting the old growth down is the only way to achieve that -- so down it goes!

These other two needed cutting too:

With the chainsaw it took me at most 10 minutes to cut all five plants down. With loppers it would have taken me almost that long to do a single plant.

The final thing I did differently was to shred the grass stalks immediately. Usually I pile them up and put them through the chipper another day -- due to the fact that cutting all of them down was a big enough job. The chainsaw saved me so much effort though, I was ready to tackle the chipper too!

(Is feeding grass stalks into a noisy chipper for hours really gardening? I say "yes".)

So after a few hours of hauling the cut grasses and feeding them into the chipper, I was finished. Also exhausted. Plus covered in chaff and grass seeds:

These seeds are embedded in the glove somehow.

Here's what the beds looked like before and then after:

Here's the other view:

You can see how much privacy I've lost, but I'll soon get it back once things start growing again.

For the privacy I've lost, I've gained a lot of "browns" (carbon) for the compost pile, something to offset all of the banana peels that keep going in there:

I don't know if I've ever cleaned up so much of my yard in a single day before. It was really a productive day -- or at least 6 hours of a day!

Now I can just sit back and relax for the rest of the year, right?

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