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Prepare Your Vegetable Garden For Winter

Pumpkins In Field

Winter weather can be rough on a vegetable garden bed. If left exposed, the elements can erode and dry out the soil you’ve worked so hard to improve. Here are a few tips to keep your garden beds not only protected but actually productive during the coldest months.

Plant A Cover Crop.

Lots of gardeners plant a cover crop such as buckwheat, clover, vetch, oats, radish, ryegrass, and other crops to overwinter (defined as “to pass through or wait out the winter season”). The cover crop, also known as “green manure“, grows late summer and fall and stays in the bed all winter. It is either winter killed from cold weather or continues growing in spring. When you’re ready to plant the bed in spring, till the cover crop into the bed or use it as mulch or compost. Some cover crops like Daikon Radish bring an added benefit of penetrating deep into the soil (10-18″), helping to loosen up the tough areas. When the radish rots, a nice space is left for water and nutrients to fill in.

Mulching.

Mulch will protect the topsoil in your garden beds and will help to keep weed seeds from settling in the soil in the early spring. Mulching also warms the soil bed a few degrees, making it very attractive to earthworms, which will work the soil closer to the surface than they would otherwise. This creates a nice rich humus for you the following spring. Add compost into the bed before mulching or planting your cover crop, so you give the soil organisms time to do their thing before spring.

Fall Garden Cleanup.

This is very important: discard any blighted or otherwise diseased plants. THROW THEM AWAY – DO NOT COMPOST THEM. Tomato blight and other fungal infections can survive on the plant over the winter and even in your compost pile, so that means destroying any diseased plants. Also, clean up and discard any diseased leaves laying under your fruit trees, and trim any diseased or dead wood from those trees. As for stems and leaves of plants that were otherwise healthy during the growing season, leave them stand over the winter as pollinators will make their homes in them.

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Fall Shed Cleanup.

Fall is a great time to clean up your garden shed and clean tools. If you’re anything like me, your shed is a mess by the time summer ends with bird netting tangled in plant stakes, plastic flower pots scattered everywhere, and rakes and shovels jammed aside the lawnmower. Organize and clean up the shed before you break a leg. Read these tips on cleaning up your garden shed.

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