Some people mark the beginning of spring by the start of the baseball season. Not me, not for years. I get excited when the daffodils and flowering trees come into bloom, when the grass (even my Cape Cod lawn) greens up, and the weather becomes mild enough to spend hours outdoors in the garden.

This year there is a new element to spring – the meadow! Not only do I need to go peer at everything that is starting to grow there, I also need to figure out how to best do cleanups and prepare for the growing year.

As you may remember, I did not clean up or mow in the fall, in order to provide habitat for overwintering insects and pollinators. So, at minimum, I had cutbacks to do this spring. Here’s what the meadow looked like a week ago, before I started.

All the plant stalks and grass seed stems are still standing, and the low grasses are in a brown mound. There are some perennials starting to come in, and there is a nice crop of the annual weed hairy bittercress on all the bare ground, but I decided not to worry about that – it will go dormant soon, and once the meadow fills in it will not have enough light for the seeds in the soil to germinate.

It took about an hour for two of us to go through and cut back the stalks and stems. Mostly we broke the stems off near the ground, then cut up the stalk into shorter pieces, 6-8″, and just left the pieces. They will be covered up by the new growth and will eventually decompose into nutrients for next year’s plants. I once heard a landscaper describe this method as “chop and drop”, and I love that name.

Here is the “after” picture – a good bit neater, but I see a few stalks we missed.

Walking around the meadow, I noticed a number of weeds coming in, too. I will have to get back up there soon to get rid of them before they get spread or too big. Here is some mugwort and a thistle, for example.

It’s too soon for the warm-weather grasses to make an appearance, but several of the perennials have some nice foliage growth already. Here is seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens) and pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea) on the left, and slender mountain mint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium) on the right.

And finally, a lovely reward for the work we had been putting in – a butterfly! (My app calls it an American painted lady).