What to do til frost

What to cut now, and what to leave alone

A running list of what to cut now, what to leave standing for the birds and the bees, and what simply waits until frost takes it down for you.

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A flower-garden planner and a weekly care digest - written for your exact plants, zone, and frost dates.

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New subscribers, one trial per person.

Tall trees in orange and yellow fall color against a blue sky

What you get

Grow with your garden, week by week.

Plan your beds

Map beds to scale - spacing, sun, and bloom coverage before anything goes in the ground.

Open the bed designer

Know what to do, weekly

The Garden Digest: what to sow, cut, and watch for - built around your plants and zone, not a generic calendar.

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Look it up, free

An open library of plants, insects, weeds, and fungi - search and filter by season, zone, and bloom time.

Browse the field

Free seasonal newsletter · Garden Planner $3.99/mo · Garden Digest $6.99/mo with a month free for new subscribers. See plans & pricing

Native plants by state

What is native where you garden.

Every state and province has its own page: the plants native there, the keystone hosts marked, zone ranges and planting notes. Start with your state, or type a zip on the hub and it will find it.

Plan with us

A flower garden planner that knows your garden.

Map your beds with the companion bed designer, build a plant list from the field, and let a weekly plant-care digest tell you what to sow, cut, and watch for - every reminder tuned to your zone and frost dates, not a one-size calendar.

Most planning tools are built for vegetable rows. This one is for flower gardens, written by a Hudson Valley grower - with landscape consulting when you want a second pair of hands in the garden.

Open the bed designer See plans & pricing

The companion bed designer: an 11 by 8.5 foot bed drawn to scale with bee balm, coneflower, dahlia, cosmos, tickseed and pincushion placed across it, plus bed dimensions, bed-shape presets and a sunlight slider

Live feedback: a bed harmony score of 67 rated a good match, alongside 78% bloom coverage mapped across winter, spring, summer and fall

The plant finder: a search field, a filters button, and plant cards for narcissus, forget-me-not, meadow rue and chamomile, each marked as a companion for the bed

The soil and compost calculator working out 62.3 cubic feet of fill for a 93.5 square foot bed at 8 inches deep - 42 bags, split 60/30/10 topsoil, compost and grit

A shopping list of 20 plants and 42 bags of soil with a scan-to-send QR code and an email-me-this-list button

This week6 tasks

Garlic
cut
Cut scapes (hardneck types) when they curl - improves bulb size, and the scapes are edible
Foxglove
sow
Sow direct in late spring or early summer for next year's blooms - surface sow, needs light to germinate
Clematis ‘Rooguchi’Read more
watch
Deadhead lightly if you want to tidy, but the seedheads are attractive and removal is not necessary
Carolina Rose
watch
Deadhead spent blooms to extend flowering, or leave them to develop hips for fall and wildlife

The Garden Digest

Your garden's tasks, every Thursday.

A weekly digest built from your exact plant list and frost dates - what to sow, cut, and watch for, emailed each Thursday and always live on your digest page.

Only the tasks for plants actually in your garden
Timing shifts automatically with your zone's frost dates
Overwintering reminders before the cold gets there first

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New subscribers, one trial per person.

Our story

A home-grown garden guide in the Hudson Valley.

Batten Blooms is Libby Batten - a software engineer, lifelong gardener and nature lover. After years of growing flowers for friends and family, she launched Batten Blooms in 2026 to share her harvest with others, and connect with other gardeners (at all levels) in the community.

Years in the tech industry - including work with Shopify and multiple e-commerce platforms - helps Libby bring the same precision and problem-solving to her garden that she brings to her code. Whether she's debugging a pipeline or coaxing dahlias out of clay soil, the goal is the same: build something that works beautifully and brings people joy.

Need Help?

The free newsletter

Notes from the garden, every week.

Dispatches from the garden - tips, stories and seasonal musings, free in your inbox.

After the weekly task list for your own yard? That's the Garden Digest - free for a month, for new subscribers.

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