About spring cleanup, trying different things, and the right tool for the right job.
This past week, the escarpment has finally turned green.
Here in Grimsby, seeing the escarpment here is unavoidable. It spans the entire length of the town, and so when the green canopy appears, as it has this past week, it is a monumental change. It feels like a wall of dead brown suddenly became a wall of living green.
This spring has been cooler than average, and to protect some of the more delicate plants, I have found myself keeping last year’s foliage in the gardens until the last possible moment. However, I’m catching perennials growing taller and taller. And so this week has been one of tidying the last of the winter foliage.
In other words, it has been a week of rakes.
Not all rakes are made equal, so it may be useful here to have a quick look at the different styles that I ended up using this week.
I have a few rakes with me on hand at all times, and I ended up using all of them this week in different scenarios: a regular metal fan rake, a spring-loaded fan rake that allows me to apply more downward force, a collapsible rake that fans out from a closed position to various angles, and then the slightly different but ever-useful hard rake.
The regular fan rake has a head made of flat metal tines. Depending on the rake, the tines can either be squared at the bottom or arranged in a gentle semicircle. The shape makes a slight difference in terms of accessibility to hard-to-reach areas, like behind a patio or squaring up to a hard corner. I have one of each.
The spring-loaded rake is one where the head actually has a spring attached to it. The tines are a little more heavy-duty, and so this rake can take a bit more force than the regular one.
The collapsible rake is unusual in a few ways. The tines are round instead of flat, and their angle at the bottom, where the tines touch the ground, is sharper than my regular fan rake. The head of the rake also collapses the tines onto the handle, allowing for easy storage, but also allowing for variability in the width of the rake head itself. The same rake can be made into a wide one with tines far apart, to rake between emerging perennials such as hostas. It can also be made very narrow, to reach small spaces behind hedges or between close plantings.
The hard rake is one often used to level gravel or mulch. I find it useful for getting the dead out of grasses, especially once they are cut back, for example with a Karl Foerster or a thick overgrown Miscanthus. You can really lean into it and easily get the dead out of their centers.
There are a few locations that dead leaves like hanging out.
One spot was a carpet of Blue Rug juniper hugging the ground. I found that for an initial clearing, the collapsible rake’s strong angled tines actually helped dig deep and loosen some of the decomposed foliage. However, it left a lot of residue which the round tines couldn’t grasp. I used the spring-loaded fan rake to apply some force and really loosen the leaves up further. There was still a little bit of surface residue remaining, and so I used my regular fan rake, whose tines are a little denser, to tidy up the surface layer of the juniper. I did a final pass through with a blower, which removed any remaining foliage.
Using three rakes for this job may seem excessive, and just a spring-loaded rake would have worked fine, but it is a good example of how different layers of foliage got loosened and how which rake affected the area.
The ground cover juniper is very tough and can take some raking, especially if you rake in the direction of its growth.
Around this time of year, when raking this late into spring and perennials are emerging, you will find there is plenty of dead foliage stuck between fragile emerging new growth. This is where the collapsible rake tends to really shine. I found it essential for raking between emerging hosta leaves, daylilies, and carpets of epimedium.
There are also spaces that are hard to reach and have delicate new growth wedged in between winter residue. These are places where rakes often cannot go because existing plant material is already in the way in the form of shrubby stems and the like.
For these areas, the best rake is often the hand.
This was the approach I took with bigleaf hydrangeas. They are a little sensitive to cold, so I have left a covering of leaves around their crowns to help shelter them from the lower temperatures we have been having. But now new growth is emerging from the base, and it is high time for these crowns to be free.
The best tool in this case is a careful and delicate hand that can loosen the foliage without pinching off the new growth. If left longer, the new growth turns a pale yellow, like forced endives or forced asparagus. Delicious, but not ideal for hydrangeas.
And so carefully loosening the foliage with my hand is the best way to go.
There are many rakes available in garden centers and hardware stores, each slightly different. Even the different varieties of a simple fan rake will give you an idea of the colors, materials, shapes, and sizes that tines and lengths of handles can have.
The key here is that not all rakes are made for the same purpose, and not all rakes have the same strengths and weaknesses.
My collapsible rake, essential for loosening leaves among growing hostas, has tines too thin to efficiently rake a lawn, and is too fragile to dethatch it. Likewise, a rake built for heavy pressure and lawn work would quickly damage emerging perennial growth.
As you are finishing up your own garden cleanups this year, don’t hesitate to try different rakes. Borrow one, borrow a few, or buy a couple and see what fits.
See what fits your garden, and see what fits you.