Fall Checklist - Put Your Garden to Bed
Fall Garden Checklist
It’s not quite time to walk away from your garden chores! Put your garden to bed properly and you will ensure great rewards next spring and summer. Here are some simple things you can do now:
- Cut back spent perennials to prevent slugs, snails and pests from over-wintering.
- Thin out blooming perennial bushes - spirea, gardenia, summer-blooming hydrangea, and more.
- Take out dead branches and old leaves on roses and fruit trees (do not prune yet!).
- Clean out old annuals and weeds before seeds drop.
- Clean up vegetable garden: remove spent plants, rotten veggies, diseased leaves.
- Remove rotten fruit from the ground and around trees.
- Clean and sharpen gardening tools.
- Get potted plants indoors or to protected areas and winterize containers remaining outdoors.
- Mow lawns up to the first frost – but keep grass cut to higher height (2 ½ inches). Last lawn mowing: use a mulching mower to put nitrogen back into the lawn for Dethatch and aerate lawn if needed - remove leaves and weeds.
- Clean bird feeders – plan to keep them full over winter to help resident and migratory birds.
- Fall is a great time to plant new shrubs, landscape trees, and perennials: Mother Nature waters them!
- Start researching fruit trees – plan to visit local nurseries to purchase bare root trees in early winter.
- Save some room to plant winter veggies in the garden: spinach, kale, beets, carrots, turnips and more.
- Plant garlic, onions, and shallots.
- Plant a cover crop in the cleaned garden – refresh your garden soil
- Plant bulbs for early spring blooms, such as daffodils, crocus, muscari, and tulips.
- Now is the time to improve your Renovate, reseed, and apply compost before soil gets too cold.
- Divide, dig up and store crowded bulbs and spring-blooming plants; Day and Canna lilies, gladiolas, primrose, dianthus, hostas, coneflowers, yarrow and iris.
- Give the lawn, trees, and perennials a deep watering before the frost
- Take some time to reflect on this year’s garden and landscape – what worked and what Take photos and notes. Make plans for next year’s success!
- Rake and disturb the garden soil to expose underground pests – invite chickens to “microtill.”
- Place (healthy) prunings and dead branches into the compost No pile yet? Get one started!
- If fallen leaves are raked up, pile them up in a remote part of the yard and let them rot into leaf mold.
- Mulch, mulch, mulch around all plants: prevent frost damage and improve soil over the If you don’t plant a cover crop, mulch the garden beds to improve the soil over winter.