Your garden has worked hard all summer long.
Hopefully you have reaped the benefits of your garden and filled your shelves and freezer with plenty of food to munch throughout the winter.
Today I want to share How to Winterize Your Vegetable Garden.
Like a small child who has run and played all day, your garden needs cleaned and tucked in for a winter’s sleep. This “cleaning” and “tucking” will help remove bugs and pathogens from the soil as well as replenishing its nutrients for a bountiful crop the next year.
Even if you have a small garden space, the proper treatment of a small garden will create a better yield than a large one that is mainly neglected.
How to Winterize the Vegetable Garden
Clean
Remove plants and weeds from your garden. If you have a compost pile, toss plants that are disease and bug free onto it along with any weeds that have not gone to seed.
Burn any plants that are diseased or buggy. If you live in town and cannot burn, bag them and place them out for trash pickup. Carefully gather weeds that have gone to seed and burn or bag them as well.
We use heirloom seeds for several things so we don’t want any volunteer plants the next year. For this reason, our heirloom plants are not tossed into the compost but rather burned as well.
How much plant residue you remove is up to you, but getting out the weeds, diseased plants and woody stalks are a must.
Cultivate
If you have a tiller, use it to deeply work the ground and turn under the remaining plant residue. Some years my husband will spade the garden which works it deeper than a tiller can reach. Use a garden rake to remove visible root stalks from plants and weeds.
Proper preparation of the ground now will get you in the garden that much sooner come next spring. Proper tilling loosens the soil and allows it to drain and dry, making it ready for planting!
Consider a Soil Test
Many garden centers offer soil test kits that enable you to decide the pH of your soil, and they can then offer suggestions on improving the pH for ideal growth. This isn’t necessary every fall, but if you have a growing season where your plants seem “off,” an unbalanced pH could be the culprit.
Ask your local garden center for a pH test kit. Lowe’s is a national center that commonly carries them.
An NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) test is also helpful. There is a great one found on Amazon that allows you to test your soil and find which nutrients you need to feed your garden with in the next step.
Feed Your Garden
There are two main ways to feed your garden each fall. Composting and cover crops. There are different benefits to each. Feeding your garden is important if you want it to feed you. Typically this is the most expensive part of gardening, but considering how much we save each year by growing our own foods and by reusing food scraps whenever possible, this cost is minimal.
Let’s look at the benefits of composting first. Have your soil “seed ready” before applying compost. Then spread on compost, manure, straw or other organic material. Make sure to have a minimum of 4″ up to 6″ of compost spread over the entire garden. Use this beginner’s tutorial for composting if you’re new to the idea
During the winter months, the organic matter will decompose and feed your garden. In the spring, rake the compost back in rows and plant your seeds and seedlings. As the seeds sprout, slowly begin pulling the compost back beside the seedlings.
Not only will this continue feeding your plants during the next growing season, it is also a great way to control weeds.
Planting a cover crop is also highly beneficial. Cover crops are planted 30 days before the first frost, and turned under in the spring just after flowering.
Also called green manure, cover crops restore fertility and humus to the soil as well as controlling erosion from winter rains. Cover crops are grown thickly, thus choking out most of the weeds that try to pop up in the spring.
Your local garden center is most likely to know what cover crop will grow best in your area. We’ve planted buckwheat and rye in the past. Both of them died during the winter, but still added lots of organic material to the soil.
A common blend is annual rye and hairy vetch.
How to winterize your vegetable garden is summed up in 3 easy steps:
- Clean
- Cultivate*
- Compost
*soil testing is good but optional
This should take no more than a weekend to accomplish and the rewards next year will be even greater!
What steps do you take to winterize the vegetable garden?
This post was written by Kendra at aProverbs31Wife.com.
I’m curious why using heirloom seeds means you don’t want volunteer plants?
If you are buying heirloom seeds each year, volunteer plants aren’t really a problem. If you save seeds the way we do, you don’t want cross pollination happening and sometimes volunteer plants are not pure.
We grow these huge, low acid meaty tomatoes that have been in my husband’s family for 3o+ years. We are very careful to make sure no other varieties are in a certain range to avoid cross pollination, then we save seeds from 2-3 of the very best looking tomatoes.
Every now and again someone’s seed will get contaminated and after a year or two it’s clear that the fruit is no longer as good. At this point that person will call up someone else who grows the same tomato and ask for “clean seed”
Kinda wrote a story there, but hopefully that answers your question 🙂
Sorry, I have to seriously disagree with your advice to rototill the garden. Like probably the majority of gardeners, it was drummed into my head that tilling helped aerate the soil, worked in compost or other soil amendments so they would reach the roots of transplants, and assisted young plants by breaking up soil clumps. What I did not learn is that tilling damages the soil.
According to Jeff Lowenfels, who wrote the book, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Fod Web, if you keep tilling, “the microbiology diminishes…You end up working harder, weeding more, fertilizing more, with more insect and fungal and bacterial diseases that require ‘icides’ to fix.”
” It is the bacteria and the fungi in the soil, eaten by protozoa and nematodes, that provide the nutrients plants require…{With tilling} worms are cut up and their tunnels destroyed. Worms contain bacteria in their guts that glue soil together and the tunnels provide air and water passage…The fungal shouldn’t dominate, but is important because it ties together these glued particles. And, when fungi move through soil, they leave a subway of microscopic tunnels that also allow air and water to pass and to be stored. {With tilling} the soil loses structure and doesn’t hold water or air well. Worse, the microbiology diminishes…there is no question {tilling} should not be part of the established home gardener’s vernacular…To plant, either ‘drill’ holes with a stick and put in seeds, gently pull a 2×2 board down a row to plant in rows so that you disturb as little soil as possible.”
Still hesitant not to do a tilling? Look up roto-tilling in The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening or the New York Times publication, 1000 Gardening Questions and Answers, you’ll find the same advice—do not roto-till an established garden.
I agree with the no till approach. I do what I call “lasagne ” composting in the fall with leaves and with news paper and Old straw after planting in the Springboard
Even clearing the dead plants is not only unnecessary, but even a waste of time and a waste of good fertilizer! The dead plants break down and feed your soil. It’s nature composting all by itself.
Of course remove anything diseased as you find it, and anything you don’t want to reseed in the space, but leave the rest to break down over the winter to return the nutrients to the soil that they removed to grow during the summer. And in milder winters the plants laying on the soil will make it harder for weeds to grow through the winter too.