Times Chronicle & Public Spirit
Tips on preparing your garden for winter
Fall will soon be upon us, and with it, a winding down of our gardening season. How can we best use fall’s pleasant working conditions to make our gardens attractive over the winter and to plan for a vibrant next season?
The guidelines for vegetable gardens differ a bit from landscape beds. Vegetables tend to develop various fungal, bacterial or insect diseases over the season, and some of these can over winter in debris left on the ground.
It’s usually best to clean off the soil surface to remove spent plants, dropped fruits and other debris.
Most of those materials can be composted, but if you’re dealing with a particularly problematic disease or insect issue, you may want to cook the debris in direct sun in a black plastic bag for a few days before trashing it.
For landscape beds, particularly mulched ones, disease issues are less problematic.
Annual plants may be removed and composted as they finish their season. Perennials can be tidied to remove spent blossoms or dead tissue.
How much to cut back perennials and shrubs is an aesthetic issue but also an ecological one. We now understand how important spent plant material is to many of our insect and bird friends, who use hollow stems and seeds to help them over winter. And many dried seed heads are quite attractive in the winter landscape.
If leaving dried plant material offends you or your neighbors, try removing it in your more public space, usually the front curb view, and leave it in backyard areas where you can enjoy winter wildlife activity out of the public eye.
Fall is also a good time to check your mulch. By this stage in the season, it is often either dried to a crust on top or is compacted, or both. Use a long-handled hand cultivator to gently loosen and fluff the compost. This will allow fall rains to penetrate to the roots of your trees and plants.
You may find that you have more mulch in place than it first appeared, so always fluff before adding new mulch on top of old.
As an alternative to commercial mulches, consider shredded, dry leaves.
They often are free, they don’t compact or crust over, and they are friendly to beneficial insects whose eggs and larvae develop in the loose duff of such a covering. Over time they will disintegrate and enrich the soil.
And what about the falling leaves? These are a composter’s delight, as they can be raked for use in the fall compost bin, or even bagged and stored toward next spring’s compost bins.
If grass is still green and growing as the leaves fall, attach a grass catcher to your mower and mow right over grass and leaves together.
This produces a wonderful, pre-mixed ratio of browns to greens that’s ideal for composting.
Do not feel that you must remove every fallen leaf.
For the health of your lawn, you’ll want to pick up any wet mats of shingled leaves that can smother grass, but a light covering of leaves can simply be left to decompose and add to the health of your soil and turf. Fall is soiltesting season.
A soil analysis done now will alert you to which nutrients are in low supply, and how to remediate for best plant health next season. Adding amendments now will give them time to incorporate before next gardening season.
Penn State soil test kits are available for $9 at the Berks County Extension Office, or online at https://agsci.psu.edu/ aasl/soil-testing/fertility. The advantage of PSU’s analytical results is that they include a customized recipe for how to amend your soil to bring it into alignment for the needs of your particular plants.
Fall is a perfect time to reflect on your gardening season and make sketches and notes for next season. Knowing what you planted in May is helpful, but knowing what survived and what was worth the time and effort can be a different tale.
If certain plants need to be divided or moved, this is a great time to do it, as they will not be stressed by extreme heat, and with care, can settle into a new spot before winter.
It’s a good time to note chores. Dealing with the abundance of crabgrass this season might prompt a note for the March calendar to put down a pre-emergent crabgrass preventer, a chore that could well be forgotten by springtime.