8 Steps You Need to Prepare The Perfect Fall Garden
As summer drifts away and fall begins to take a hold, it’s time to consider your garden routines and prepare for the season ahead. Any time spent now planning and preparing your garden will pay dividends in the coming season. A solid maintenance plan should guarantee a beautiful and stress free garden in the Spring.
Fall is the time to clean up beds, manage soils, prepare turf and minimize problems in advance of the new growing season. It’s also the time to plant spring blooming bulbs and pull out tender summer bloomers.
There are plenty of things to look out for as you take stock of your garden. Here are Eight essentials to consider as you begin working on the basics in the coming weeks:
Remove the weeds, dead plants, and lawn debris from your garden
Rake leaves onto the lawn and mow them with a grass catcher. The resulting mix provides an excellent cover for the vegetable garden and helps prevent weeds.
Harvest any remaining crops
Add some compost, till your soil, and cover with mulch where necessary.
Determine which bare areas could use soil amendment and new plants. By adding compost and peat moss to replace nutrients lost during summer growth your soils will be better prepared for spring planting.
Fertilize your lawn with an all-natural fertilizer
The nutrients that your lawn can store in the winter will mean a better-looking lawn come spring. Available at most garden centers, the best organic lawn fertilizers contain natural ingredients such as seaweed for potassium, bone meal for phosphorous, and feather meal for nitrogen.
Put the garden to bed
To prepare for the Fall, cover perennials with mulch, bring sensitive plants indoors, empty the compost bins and start a new batch. Spread the compost around the base of sensitive plants that can use the extra layer as a blanket.
Plant a cover crop on your vegetable garden. Removing plant debris and raking will decrease pest, disease and weed seeds that arrive over winter.
Replace the old with new
Replace summer annuals in window boxes and garden beds with cool-weather flowers.
Remove all annuals from the garden, saving the seeds so you can plant them next year.
Remove summer annuals also from window boxes, add more potting mix and plant cool-weather bloomers like ornamental kale, petunias and pansies.
Dividing perennials reinvigorates plants and gives you new plants to add to other areas of your garden or to share with neighbors and friends.
Get your container plants ready
Make room for tropical plants indoors, as many, including palms and bananas, make excellent houseplants throughout the winter months. Woody tropicals such as plumeria and citrus can easily be overwintered indoors.
Consider transplanting perennials from their containers directly into the garden. Carefully remove them from their pots, trim their roots a bit to stimulate the growth of new feeder roots, stick them in the ground and trim their top growth a little.
Herb containers can look shabby by the end of summer, so either harvest and dry them or consider moving them indoors, making sure they get a lot of natural light.
Make sure your succulents get the same light to help them through the winter months.
Make sure you keep your garden inviting for birds
When you feed birds, they can be helpful keeping your insect population under control, so that you can avoid spraying to control pests.
Lastly, no Fall prep is complete without some time spent in your shed
Clean your storage and recycle old chemicals and take note of the shelf life of what you have and what you need to stock up on before next spring. Don’t forget to tend to your tools. Apply a light coating of oil on metal tool surfaces, and rub linseed oil on wooden tool handles, sharpening all blades with a proper file.
Wherever you live, whatever your passion is, or whatever the size or layout of your garden there are plenty of easy to take steps to prepare for next year’s gardening season. If you follow these now, not only will you make your spring and summer run more smoothly, but you should improve your yields over the long term. Check off a few of these items a day and you’ll be ready for winter in no time with plenty of time freed up to plan next year’s garden. Don’t forget your Pros are always there to help you with any of the bigger projects you’re planning, and at TheHomeMag Northern California we’re always happy to help you find them and put your Garden dreams in place for this and every season.
Happy planning and gardening for the Fall!
