Minnesota Gardening Podcast

Environmentally-Responsible Landscape: Part II of my 3x3 Course

• Brad at MinnesotaGardening.com

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Fall is the perfect time to implement environmentally friendly practices in your landscape that support local ecosystems while reducing your workload. We explore part two of our 3x3 program on environmentally responsible landscaping, focusing on practical steps that make your yard more sustainable.

• Leave fallen leaves in place to provide essential overwintering habitat for pollinators and return nutrients to the soil
• Keep hollow plant stems standing through winter as they house native bee eggs and larvae
• Use the PlantNet app to identify what's growing in your yard and remove invasive species
• Pull weeds properly by removing the entire root system using tools like a weeding fork
• Recognize when selective use of chemicals might be necessary for persistent problems like thistles
• Join our free masterclass on Tuesday, September 9th at 8pm to learn three things to stop doing this fall in your landscape

Check out the complete 3x3 program with videos, workbooks and photos at MinnesotaGardening.com while it's still available for free.


Want to switch to more environmentally-responsible landscape and lawn care practices but don't know where to start?

Join our movement bringing together Midwest homeowners so that we can to make the world a better place for our kids and grandkids by building up strong local ecosystems for songbirds, pollinators, and our families to thrive.


Learn more at MinnesotaGardening.com.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome, my friend, to the Minnesota Gardening Podcast. It's awesome to have you here. And, holy cow, leaves are starting to turn, fall feels like it's in the air. I think it's supposed to get warm again here in the middle of September, but it is definitely feeling chilly and fall-like right now. So make some soup and have some fun with this.

Speaker 1:

So with that, we've got part two here of our 3x3 program, which is nine things that you can do to help make the world a better place in your landscape, being more environmentally responsible. So these are action items that you can do right now in your home lawn and landscape. So this is part two of three of our free course over at minnesotagardeningcom, so you can go over there and check it out. There are videos, there are workbooks, there are photos a lot of things that you can do as a free part of Minnesota Gardening. So this course will not be free forever, so make sure to check it out today so that you can get the most value out of that. And then, before we start with this episode, which is the audio from the part two environmental landscape video, I want to make sure to let you know that on Tuesday of next week, so Tuesday, september 9th. So if you're listening to this live, tuesday, september 9th 2025, we are having a live masterclass. So it's our monthly masterclass we have at Minnesota Gardening, and this is totally free as well. So it's three things to stop doing this fall. We're going to go through fall tasks and what you should not be doing that most people in their landscapes are doing. So head over to minnesotagardeningcom and click on events and RSVP to join us on Tuesday at 8 pm. All right, we are in our second full lesson here, so thank you very much.

Speaker 1:

If you haven't been through yet, my name is Brad Tabke here, host of Minnesota Gardening and Founder, and I'm just really excited to have you here, where we're getting nine things maybe more again, stick around to the end. That are ways that you, as a homeowner, can make sure that you are becoming more environmentally friendly in your lawn and landscape practices, and so we are now moving on. We did lawn care and now we're doing landscape practices, and the fourth item that we have here is leaving the leaves, and so we're going to broaden this out a little bit further here. We want our landscapes to again, as we said, emulate nature as much as humanly possible, and that means that when the leaves fall under a tree, they're meant to stay, or generally stay, in that area. Those leaves are broken down, they're recycled, those nutrients go back up into the tree for the next growth cycle, and so we want to make sure that we're emulating that as much as possible. For whatever reason, folks were convinced that all that needs to be gathered up and removed and we have to have these perfectly tidy, very neat and clean landscapes, and that's just not true and it's actually really against what our local ecosystems need, because many of our pollinator friends, many of our songbird friends, they need those leaves to overwinter so that caterpillars and other things can overwinter in those leaves. There have been shown to be a significant number of insects and pollinators that overwinter in that leaf material and we want to let that fall and we want to let that stay where it is in general and be there. So we want to leave the leaves in the fall.

Speaker 1:

Do not rake them up and take them out, just leave them basically where they land. If you need to have a cleaner lawn area, if you're worried about them blowing around in your neighbor's area, you can blow them into your landscape beds, and so you're going to have beds that are going to catch those leaves and hold them where they are, and that's natural mulch, so you don't have to pay for mulch. You can just leave those there. You can add leaves to it and let those uh, let those be. You can just mow over them once, twice, that kind of thing, and let those, those leaves, soak into the ground. But generally leave those leaves where they are as much as possible. Same with this is a lawn care side of things. But leave the clippings in your lawn. Always do not remove the clippings, because that's just nitrogen that those plants are losing and so it's more fertilizer petroleum-based fertilizer that you'll need to use. So let those stay there. So leave the clippings, leave the leaves and also leave the stems.

Speaker 1:

There are a significant number of especially native bees here in the upper Midwest that overwinter and lay their eggs in the hollow stems of the last years, of the previous year's plant growth. And so what happens? They're really cool studies that follow deer around as they browse in the woods and all the native bees that follow those deer around, and then, after the deer chomp off a top of a stem and then that hollow stem is open, they go in there and they start to lay eggs in there and they leave food in there, pollen in there for their future larvae that emerge, and so it's really important as a part of your local ecosystem and a support ecosystem a huge number of native bees and wasps and other friends that we leave the stems on our plants and so leave those there through spring, and you can clean them up in the spring a little bit if you need a tidier area, and again, this is another thing that we go into depth with at Minnesota Gardening as a member. The next thing is know what plants you have in your landscape. You want to make sure you're removing all the invasive plants so you don't have any of those, and my favorite plant app that you should download is it's plantnetapp, and so it's available for Apple, android and on the desktop, and you can find it at plantnetorg, and so it's just a really, really great app that I've tried a lot of them and it is really good with identifying weeds, with identifying native plants, with identifying helpful plants and going through. So this is just a couple different things here. This is what the interface looks like and you can add a picture. You can take a picture whenever you want, and then you identify that picture as to what part of the plant it is, and it gives you really good recommendations as to what that plant is. So PlantNet is my favorite app for identifying plants in your landscape.

Speaker 1:

And number six here is making sure that when you are weeding, you are pulling the roots out of the ground, and so this seems like a really simple one, but a lot of people don't do it. It always amazes me how many folks don't. So you want to make sure that you are pulling the entire root system out of the ground, because what happens is, if you don't get that root system, a lot of times you pull the top off and then there are five different new plants that come up, and those are even more difficult to pull out. So when you're taking the time to pull out weeds, make sure to use a tool like this. Weeding fork is my favorite thing to use. There's a resource section in minnesota gardening, so if you scroll into the main menu, there's my favorite things and those are my resources, and there's a link to weeding forks here.

Speaker 1:

But you push in the ground, you wiggle it around a little bit to loosen up that soil and then you can get the entire root out. 90% of the time it's not going to be perfect for you, but most of the time you can get the entire root out. 90% of the time it's not going to be perfect for you, but most of the time you can get those out, and so plants regrow. If you don't pull that entire root out, so this will save you, your future self, a lot of time and energy and help with that, and so make sure to use a tool if you have things that are hard to pull or susceptible to regrowing, like different weeds with different grasses and especially thistles. And a little caveat here that we talked about with lawn care as well, is that sometimes you need to nuke it, so, like this has some thistles in there and you just have to kill those with chemicals. There's really no way that if you have a thistle problem, you can get ahead of it just by pulling, and so sometimes chemicals are necessary, but we want to reduce that as much as humanly possible.

Speaker 1:

The third section that we've got here before our conclusion for you, and number seven, eight and nine, are plant helpful plants, and so head to the next lesson and we will get to the plant helpful plants section of this three by three free course.

Speaker 1:

Thanks again for being here. See what I mean. I hope that you enjoyed that the audio from that video at Minnesota gardening on three by three. And so this is all about environmental landscape in this episode, and then next week we talk all about a different topic and we will be going over what is next with planting helpful plants, and so there's also a bonus action item, uh, involved with that one. So planting helpful plants comes up in part three, which will release next week with the audio, and again you can get the video for all these over at minnesota gardening. And so, while you're there, make sure rsvp for next uh tuesday's event where we have a free masterclass for you on three things that you need to stop doing right now for this fall landscape. So I will see you soon and have a great day, thank you.