You’ve worked hard on your garden all summer long. Hopefully, you got to enjoy beautiful flowers and foliage and maybe even have a pantry or freezer full of fruits and veggies to show for your efforts. Now, it’s time to think about how to winterize garden beds.
Staying on top of your fall garden cleanup is crucial for maintaining the health of your perennial plants, shrubs, trees, and soil. However, clearing away every scrap of plant matter is not necessary or beneficial. In this post, you’ll learn how to winterize a garden while helping pollinators and other wildlife.
Shorter days, cold weather, and maybe even snow and ice are on the way. Preparing garden beds for winter might seem daunting at first, but rest assured that it’s well worth the effort. Follow these easy steps for winterizing your garden to set yourself up for gardening success in the spring.
How to Winterize Garden Beds
Preparing your garden for winter means protecting your soil against erosion, insulating the root systems of overwintering plants, and minimizing opportunities for pests and plant diseases to persist into the next growing season. However, it’s also essential to remember that fallen leaves, hollow stems, and seed heads provide critical habitat and food sources for beneficial insects and wildlife. Like everything else in nature, it’s all about finding a healthy balance.
If you have any tender plants that you’d like to overwinter, now is the time to dig them up and get them indoors. Tender bulbs include dahlias, gladiolas, tuberous begonias, and canna lilies, to name a few. These plants must go through a dormant phase and should get dug up after the first light frost when all of their foliage has died back. Store them in a cool, dark location protected from freezing temperatures for the winter.
You can also try overwintering your favorite annuals, such as fibrous begonias and geraniums, and tender herbs, like rosemary, lemongrass, and lemon verbena, by transplanting them into pots and keeping them near a sunny window. Cold hardiness varies greatly by variety, so be sure to check whether your plants can survive a winter in your zone.
Pollinator-Friendly Fall Garden Cleanup
It’s essential to clean up garden beds for the winter to reduce the risk of plant diseases and insect infestations next season. This includes removing any lingering weeds and annuals and cutting back certain perennials. Add the plant material you remove to your compost pile, turning it into future fertilizer. However, dispose of weeds with seeds off of your property. That way, they won’t come back to haunt you next year.
If you had problems with insect pests or plant diseases, remove these plants from your garden altogether and either burn them or dispose of them in the garbage. Do not add them to your compost. Insect eggs and fungal spores are remarkably resilient and can overwinter in dead plant material and compost.
Leaves and hollow stems give native pollinators and other beneficial insects a safe place to overwinter. However, insect pests and plant pathogens can also overwinter in dead plant matter. Find an out-of-the-way spot on your property for a few small leaf piles, and add the rest to your compost. Dry leaves also make excellent mulch for your garden beds. Learn more about pollinator-friendly fall garden cleanup in this article from the University of Illinois Extension.
Whether to cut back perennials or not depends on the plant species. Leaving flower heads and tall grasses adds texture and interest to otherwise empty flower beds in winter. In addition, the seed heads and tall foliage provide food and habitat for birds. Perennials to leave intact for the winter include black-eyed Susans (rudbeckia), blanket flowers (gaillardia), coneflowers (echinacea), stonecrop (sedum), and yarrow (achillea millefolium). You can also leave certain annual flowers like calendula, marigolds, and sunflowers for the birds.
Some perennials need to get cut back in the fall for plant health reasons. These include bearded iris, bee balm (monarda), hostas, lilies, and peonies. Leave at least 6 inches of stems and leaves to protect the root system from frost. Wait to prune shrubs and trees until late winter or early spring when they’re dormant.
Plant Fall Bulbs and Perennials
Plant your fall bulbs and perennials before the ground freezes so that you can jump-start your garden in the spring. For bulbs, several good candidates are tulips, daffodils, allium, hyacinth, and crocus. Perennials to plant in the fall include coneflower, sedum, bee balm, yarrow, and salvia. Edible crops that can get a head start in the spring by planting in the autumn include garlic and bare-root asparagus crowns.
Bulbs must get planted in well-drained soil to prevent rot. If you have heavy clay soil, consider adding a few handfuls of sand at the bottom of the hole for extra drainage.
Dig your planting hole three times deeper than the bulb height. Then, plant the bulb with the wider root side down and the tapered or pointed end where the leaves will sprout facing upwards.
Keep the light requirements of each plant variety in mind when choosing your fall planting locations. Consider when the plants will start sprouting in the spring. Early bloomers like daffodils and crocus can get planted where they will get ample sunlight before the trees leaf out, as they will be nearly finished by the time the trees provide significant shade. Later bloomers like allium, hyacinth, and coneflower should get planted where they consistently get at least six hours of direct sunlight throughout the growing season.
Give Your Plants One Last Drink
Before turning off your outdoor water for the winter, give your plants a nice long drink. This is especially true for any perennials, shrubs, and trees planted this season. If you live in a climate where the ground doesn’t stay frozen all winter long, you should water your trees and shrubs once or twice throughout the winter when the temperature is above freezing.
To avoid damaging your hoses and irrigation, ensure they are completely empty before storing them for the coming months. It’s also helpful to store them hanging, if possible. That way, any remaining water will continue to drain.
Winterize Garden Beds with Mulch
Your garden soil is not just dirt. It’s a complex community of microscopic life that, when properly cultivated, is your best garden helper. Maintaining soil health is a delicate balance of promoting a healthy environment where all those beneficial soil microbes can thrive without “loving them to death.”
While it’s important to add nutrients to your soil regularly, tilling too often and going too deep can disturb the micro-biome that helps to keep your garden thriving. So skip the digging! In more ways than one, you’ll save time and energy by creating a naturally self-sustaining environment in which your plants can grow and thrive. If you’re curious about soil microbes and want to learn more, read this article from the Innovation Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Colorado State University.
Mulching is an essential part of how to winterize garden beds. Add several inches of compost to your garden soil every few years to refresh the nutrients without overfertilizing. Then, cover the beds with a thick layer of mulch about six inches deep. Leaves, grass clippings, pine needles, straw, and wood chips make excellent mulch material.
Mulching creates a protective layer on top of the soil that will help protect against erosion, retain moisture, and suppress weeds. Gradually, your little garden helpers (AKA soil microbes) will break down the organic matter and turn it into nutrients that plants’ root systems can readily absorb. Doing so will allow you to become less reliant on chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.
Another benefit of mulching comes from insulation, although not as you might think. The mulch “blanket” doesn’t serve to keep your soil warm in winter but rather to keep it fully frozen until spring. That way, early thaws won’t prompt your perennials to start waking up too soon, only to die back in the next freeze.
By putting in a bit of work now and preparing garden beds for winter, you’ll enjoy tremendous benefits when you start your spring planting preparations. Just imagine walking out to your garden in a few months on a sunny spring day to find healthy, nutrient-rich soil, the first leaves of your daffodils starting to come up already, and a tidy area ready for a new year of gardening!
Do you have any questions or suggestions about how to winterize garden beds? Please share them in the comments! If you found these fall garden cleanup tips helpful, please share this article with your fellow green thumbs.