Prepping the Garden for Fall and Winter

Many people are under the assumption that once the nights start to get colder and you start to see the first hints of frost that the time to be working in your garden is over.

Well that is just not the case.

There is a lot of work that can be done in the fall to enhance and prepare you garden for next year.  To name one off the top of my head you can plant some sort of fall cover crop to enhance you soil like this one,

If trying to grow something after the main garden season is done is not your thing then there are still a few things you should consider doing.  The first is garden sanitation.  At the end of every season you should take all the tops from the plants and remove them from the garden.  This is to remove potential habitat for insects or diseases that may have snuck into your garden over the season.  If you have plants with obvious infestations they should be removed and placed far away from the garden to decompose back into the earth over time. Anything that isn't obviously infected can be placed into a compost bin which may be hot composted and returned to the garden.

After basic sanitation some light weeding is usually in order to loosen soil and remove pesky summer weeds from the garden.  Many people stop here and will call that good but to really prepare the garden for the fall and winter you should consider some sort of mulch to cover and protect the soil.

Mulch does so much to protect and improve the garden that any garden without mulch in the winter would be like you going outside in winter without any clothing.  Anyways back to mulching, their are quite a few opinions out there and I am loathe to add mine to the mix but here I go.

I have a couple principles that I follow when I am adding mulch to my garden.

1. Always add a variety of different material type and sizes
2. Make it deep enough to suppress weeds
3. Mulch must be easy to move around both in and out of the garden.

Mulching the garden in the fall protects the soil from winter erosion, and provides habitat for beneficial soil organisms like earthworms and fungus.  Plus it will slowly add organic matter and nutrients to the soil over the winter and provide a great seed bed by spring.

Preparing the garden for fall is a simply process that can save you a lot of effort in spring time.  By doing the proper due diligence in the fall you can plant sooner with less effort and far less work over the course of the next summer.