Preparing Your Fall Garden

As summer winds down and fall begins, now is an excellent time to consider ways to prepare your garden for the upcoming weather transition. With its warm colors, cooler temperatures, and festive occasions, fall is the perfect time to tend to your garden and make the most of what the season has to offer. If you are interested in increasing the potential of your spring blooms, fall is the optimal season for cleaning up garden beds, tending to the soil, and removing sensitive summer bloomers.

The following fall preparation tips will help you get your garden in shape for the colder months and maintain soil integrity using sustainable practices that are more kind to the environment.

Clean Your Garden and Save Seeds

Cleaning your garden is the first essential step in preparation for fall. You want to remove weeds and dead annuals from the garden beds. If they are in good condition, you can add them to your compost and allow them to break down naturally. If they are diseased, you should dispose of them using bags made for yard waste. Ridding your garden of compromised plants prevents them from damaging the health of your soil, and removing weeds will prevent them from spreading.

Be sure to collect and save seeds from your garden so that you will be ready to replant them in the spring. Before storing seeds, dry them fully and label them to prevent compromise, and ensure there are no mix-ups.

Supply Soil with Needed Nutrients

Once your garden is free of dying blooms and weeds, your soil should be properly fed with manure, compost, organic fertilizers, and mulch. Fall is a great time for fertilization because the soil has time to replenish and absorb needed nutrients before spring.

Get a Jump on Spring with Mulching

Mulching is an excellent way to keep your soil warm in colder months because the warmth allows your planted spring bulbs to adequately germinate. Mulch is also great for keeping the soil around shrubs, trees, and perennials warm in areas prone to extremely cold climates. If you have dormant annual beds, you can lightly till or add a layer of mulch to supply the soil with organic matter and other nutrients.

Sustainability

If you take a sustainable approach to gardening, the following practices will help you prepare your garden for fall without harming the surrounding environment.

• Start a compost collection (if you do not already have one).
• Leave some plant materials (stems and leaves) on the ground during the cleaning phase to replenish the soil with organic matter, especially in the case of perennials. (Vegetable gardens, xeric gardens, and dryland gardens are exceptions to this rule.)
• Use waste bags to hold on to pulled weeds and dead annuals for compost instead of tossing them into the trash.

Sustainable gardening helps lower the massive amount of reusable materials in landfills and allows them to be repurposed as an essential gardening resource. 

We have additional gardening sources on our blog if you would like to know more about maintaining your garden or choosing garden flowers for spring. You can also contact us; we would love to speak with you.