Time to pay the piper, as it were. There's a cost to maintaining even a modest garden and enjoying it throughout the spring, summer and fall months. For me, that time is middle- to late-fall. It's energy sapping, and there's a lot of work to cleaning up a mature garden to wait out the winter months. And in Canada, there's a lot of winter months; roughly from late October to early April.

The garden is tired, it has worked enormously to do its best to show off its potential. To reach its potential it requires some fairly basic needs; good soil that has been amended from time to time with compost, along with sun and rain. The summers we enjoy here in eastern Ontario deliver the last two ingredients and it's up to me to provide the first.

Although a garden needn't necessarily be orderly, it does require fairly regular tidying-up. And if it's done regularly that requirement is fairly light, just an hour or two -- often considerably less -- here and there to keep vegetation in check and detritus to a minimum. That being so, maintaining the garden throughout its growing season is not the least bit difficult. A minimum of time and effort.

In the spring I like to contemplate a garden that has undergone the rigours of the winter months but is prepared to welcome a paucity of ministration. The effort at that time is focused on planting annuals, for the most part. The perennials are prepared to take on their own schedule of emerging from the warming soil and managing their growth and their eventual flowering.

Because I prefer to clean up the gardens in the fall so that when spring arrives there is consequentially very little to be done, it is in the fall that the major work involved in garden maintenance greets me. It's when, little by little, the perennials are cut back, the annuals are composted, and whatever bulbs and roots that will be saved are prepared for basement storage over-winter.

There was a time when I was younger when all of this work was done within a day or two. But of course that was with a much younger garden as well, with infinitely less work to be done, although to be truthful, I also did a lot more winter preparation in covering some of the more delicate plants, something no longer required because they've hardened off and are now able to survive the cold of winter.

Now, because I'm older and with less energy to spare, I string out the job of cleaning up the garden and other preparations for winterizing the garden. It now takes weeks and weeks of ongoing effort to effect the complete winterizing. Devoting several hours each time I tackle the job, it will eventually all be done with a relative minimum of energy, conserving both the garden and my capacity to do the work without physical over-extension.

The absolute reality is that I find it all enjoyable; surveying the garden and deciding what will be next. Then looking back and feeling quite comfortable with the energy expenditure and the subsequent results. A happy medium for the garden and for me as well.