5 Tips to Prepare Your Garden for Winter

Keeping plants and vegetation healthy during Spring and Summer is a no-brainer, but how do we keep them alive after the first freeze?!

Check out these top tips on how we keep a fresh garden throughout the colder months!

Weeding

As the cool Fall nights approach, you may notice your garden a little more droopy than normal. But it is not until the first hard freeze that you want to take steps to prevent your plants from dying off.

It’s normal for more tender plants to die off after the freeze and that’s perfectly fine. This makes weeding easier as you can see which plants need to go.

Be sure to pull up pea, bean, tomato and squash plants and put them in compost!

Compost

I separate my compost into two piles:

(1) Leafy greens and rotting veggies that can be added back to the soil and

(2) Diseased and invasive plants that I want to prevent from spreading throughout the garden.

If you’re not planning on digging up bulbs or transferring plants indoor for the Winter, go ahead and top off your garden beds with the healthy compost!

Mulching

Another option if you are not transferring plants would be to protect the soil and insulate the plant roots using mulch. This moderates the temperature and keeps them from thawing and freezing over and over eventually killing them off.

Potting

Digging up all bulbs and perennials and placing them indoors is a great way to save them from the harsh temperature change. Store them in a non heated garage for safekeeping and replant them when Spring arrives!

Start New

Fall is the perfect season to start new garden beds. Building in a place where snow doesn’t directly fall would be ideal and if you have stubborn weeds in the area the black plastic method would suffice. Building raised beds would be a great Winter project!