Winterizing Garden Tips

Once you're done carving pumpkins, there are a number of serious fall chores for the landscaper to complete before winter in order to ready the landscape for the next growing season.

To maximize your landscaping efficiency when raking leaves, Make Mulch and Compost With the Leaves That You Rake. One way to make extra mulch is by taking advantage of the thing that's most abundant in the fall, leaves! Using dried leaves to make mulch has several benefits.

First, you get rid of the leaves that are littering your yard. Second, you get free mulch. And third, the mulch that's created by dried leaves has a special benefit -- it's called "leaf mold." This mold is actually broken down pieces of composting leaves that have high amounts of calcium and magnesium, both important to strong plant growth.

Another advantage of leaf mold is that it holds high amounts of moisture and when you add it to your garden soil it helps young spring plants stay hydrated. In order to make leaf mold, you need a large container or cage.

Note: You should already have applied fertilizer to cool season grasses early in the fall. Since these grasses often grow most vigorously during periods of moderate weather (not too hot, not too cold), it is precisely at this time that they can best use the nutrients provided by a fertilizer. Fertilization helps the lawn recover from the summer heat and prepares it for the next growing season.

Winterizing Annual beds:

After harvesting your fruits and flowers, remove old plant matter from the garden, placing it in your compost bin. Leaving it behind in the garden would invite plant diseases next growing season.

Protect your topsoil from the rigors of winter. You have two options here: You can plant a cover crop for large beds. Or you can apply a mulch. Mulching is more efficient for smaller beds. And landscapers have a ready source of mulch in the leaves that they rake. Some garden experts recommend spreading compost on the soil as well at this time.Some disagree with this strategy, feeling that it is a waste of compost. And recommend keeping your compost protected in a compost bin during the winter, waiting until planting season to spread it in the garden.

Winterizing Trees and Shrubs:

Winterize small deciduous shrubs that have fragile branches with a lean-to or some other sort of structure to keep heavy snows off their limbs. Deciduous shrubs provide no interest in winter any ways, so you are not losing anything visually by covering them. Evergreens, by contrast, are the cornerstone of winter landscaping aesthetics.

To a great degree winterizing trees and larger shrubs can be achieved simply by watering them properly in the fall, since the winter damage that they sustain often stems from their inability to draw water from the cold, hard earth.

Winterizing Perennials

Perennial garden beds ideally should be cleaned up and mulched as part of your work in fall gardens. Remove old stalks and leaves -- you'll have to do so in the spring any ways, so you might as well be a step ahead. But if, for whatever reason, you are not able to mulch your perennial beds in the fall, then do not clean away the old stalks and leaves either -- they will serve as a makeshift mulch, affording some small degree of protection to the roots of your perennials.

In other words, the cleaning and the mulching go together: either do both or neither one. But it is best to do both, in order to keep your garden disease-free and well insulated.

Call A Abby Group for all your landscaping solutions.