October Episode 2 Ready For Winter

Winter is just around the corner, the fall air is crisp and leaves are changing to their brilliant colors. There are a lot of things you can do to ready your garden for winter.

By performing a few tasks now you can better prepare your garden for the coming winter and spring.

Make sure your new plantings and perennials have sufficient moisture. Just because the weather has cooled down doesn’t mean that they quit requiring water. Apply extra water if it doesn’t rain enough for your plants.

Plant your flowering Cabbage, flowering Kale, fall mums, and winter pansies. Depending what your winter climate is you will have color all winter or until a hard frost. You can protect from a killing frost by covering your Chrysanthemums and Asters, this will keep them blooming for quite a while longer.

Adding mulch to your gardens will keep the soil warmer, but you need to harden off your plants by spreading a thin layer of mulch, until after frost then spread a thicker layer after the ground has frozen.

Pick the seeds of wildflowers so you can sow them next spring.

It is time to plant a cover crop of clovers, cow peas, soybeans, or vetches. This will produce “green manure” when plowed under next spring. These plants produce nitrogen and organic matter for next year’s crop, they will help to control weeds over the winter.

Lawn - Mow your grass as long as it keeps is growing….

Last week we talked about aerating your lawn. The first week of October is a good time to over-seed and fertilize your lawn. Use a good fertilizer with a low amount of nitrogen, this will slow the top growth and build up root growth.

Rake or mow your leaves each week. Your grass needs sunlight as it is creating sugars to store for good growth next spring. If you leave them on the lawn it will smother the grass and kill it. When you remove the leaves add them to your compost pile. You can mulch in a few, but too many even mulched will smother your grass.

Various tasks

Slugs - Slugs and snails start moving through your garden as soon as the fall rains begin. Apply an application of slug bait will eliminate a lot of slugs and prevent them from reproducing this fall and reducing the spring population.

Weeds will start growing again, so remove all you can to reduce the number of seeds in the spring.

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