The 2025 UMass Garden Calendar comes out every fall, just as we are putting our gardens to bed for the winter. As always, the calendar is a must-have for gardeners. It gives daily tips on indoor and outdoor gardening and other related subjects, reminding us that our gardening lives never really go dormant.

This year’s calendar has a special section called Backyard Apple Basics that gives instruction on the best types of trees, pruning, pest management and fertilizing for fledgling orchardists.

Every month of the calendar has a gorgeous photograph to inspire us for the coming season. For people who don’t keep a full gardening journal (something I always aspire to but rarely keep up with), the calendar is an easy place to record garden activities such as planting annuals, dividing perennials, and top-dressing with compost — things that I swear I’ll remember but months, or even weeks, later I have no recollection of when or where I did them.

For me, the arrival of the UMass calendar always marks a time of reckoning. It’s fall, and as I tidy up my garden beds I see reminders everywhere of the gardening season just passed. An oakleaf hydrangea that has failed to prosper since I planted it two years ago suddenly woke up this summer and flourished. lts ruby and purple leaves call out from a sea of browning foliage. Success!

Elsewhere, things are out of control. A stubborn patch of bittersweet that I thought I’d eradicated in early summer has roared back stronger than ever. This rapacious invader brings to mind an expression of my mother’s that I never really understood, at least the way she used it.

Remarking on seeing an old friend, she would say, “I ran into Bill Donnelly the other day. Big as life and twice as nasty.”

For gardeners, the matter of “tidying up” has gotten more complicated as we learn more about the role of our gardens in the larger ecological scheme of things. The entomologist Doug Tallamy has written several books about gardening as an act of ecological stewardship.

His titles include “How Can I Help? Saving Nature With Your Yard,” and “Nature’s Best Hope.”

I’ve never seen Tallamy’s garden, but I can guess from his writing that environmental concerns take precedence over aesthetics. It’s a balance, to be sure.

We are encouraged to leave dead stalks of perennials uncut so that birds can eat their seeds through the winter. We’re advised to let fallen leaves remain in certain areas — even though they may look messy — so that caterpillars and other insects have a sheltered place to overwinter.

Leaves will eventually provide nourishing compost that we can spread throughout our gardens. But we don’t want to leave them where they’ll smother early blooming bulbs, or early perennial shoots. Simply put, the fall garden cleanup requires a lot more consideration and judgment than it used to.

The past year I have become particularly disturbed by the havoc that climate change has wreaked on our gardens, farms and forests. A drought that started in August was briefly abated by a rainy spell but has dug in its heels and shows no signs of letting up.

My rain gauge is lying on its side in a bed of dried leaves. I can’t bring myself to stick it back in the ground. And far more important, our fields and forests are tinder dry. I used to think of forest fires as a Western phenomenon, but not anymore. There have been many brush fires in the Pioneer Valley and surrounding areas in recent weeks.

Adding to the danger, the weather has been unseasonably warm and windy. The weather icons on my phone’s 10-day forecast indicate nothing but sunshine now and forever. A lit cigarette dropped from a car window, sparks from a dragging muffler on the road, the slightest negligence can trigger a disaster.

In this drought, it’s especially important to keep birdbaths clean and full. With so little water accessible to birds (puddles, small streams etc.) they are particularly in need of water to drink and bathe in. The sight of birds splashing and playing in the water makes my heart sing. If you don’t have a birdbath, it’s not too late to get one!

Speaking of our feathered friends, to assuage my sense of doom and gloom I have started participating in the feeder watch program run by the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology. I cannot recommend this activity strongly enough. It requires very little effort and is thoroughly rewarding. The basic drill is this:

Find a comfortable place to sit from where you can observe your bird feeder. For 15 minutes, record the number and species of birds that come to the feeder. If you’re a novice, a guide is provided to identify the most common birds in our area: house finches, blue jays, nuthatches, chickadees, and so forth. Then log your observations into the Cornell feeder watch site.

Some days are quiet and contemplative; others are a riot of activity, with so many birds you can barely keep up. It’s a wonderful way of centering your mind for 15 uninterrupted minutes. The time flies by, I promise. If you’re interested, here’s the website: feederwatch.org. (If you’re wary of bears who are still out frolicking in this warm weather, hold off on putting out your feeders, or bring them in at night.)

I will close with another bright moment in my landscape: I recently spotted a brilliant purple aster springing lustily out of a hollowed-out tree stump by the side of the road. In last month’s column, I wrote about the marvel of colorful autumn asters. Did this aster read my column? It certainly put a smile on my face.

Mickey Rathbun is an Amherst-based writer whose new book, “The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir,” has recently been published by White River Press.