Warm fall days are great for installing Christmas lights. It is much easier to wrap branches with strings of lights on warm days in mid- to late October than on cold days in late November or early December.

Use LED lights to save on power. With LEDs, you also can use more strings on a circuit.

Buy warm color white LED lights if you want to match the color of the commonly used white incandescent lights. Cool-color LED white lights have a blue cast to them. Wrap branches of your trees with strings of lights to accent the tree’s form.

The Chicago Botanic Garden staff starts installing strings of lights in early October.

• Avoid using gravel with crushed limestone for the base of hardscape features such as walks, driveways and patios. Limestone increases the alkalinity of soils and will make growing some plants more difficult if they are planted adjacent to the limestone base.

Plants such as witch hazel and river birch, which are sensitive to alkaline soil conditions, will start to become chlorotic as their roots grow into the limestone base. There are alternate materials to use for the base of hardscapes that do not contain limestone.

• After a killing frost, remove dead plant debris from annual and vegetable beds. Sanitation is especially important if you have had disease problems in your planting beds this year. Remove all diseased foliage or fruits and do not add the affected materials to your compost pile since most home compost piles do not get hot enough to kill diseased organisms.

• Tim Johnson is director of horticulture at Chicago Botanic Garden, chicagobotanic.org.