Putting Your Garden to Bed

Gardening isn’t just for spring and summer. As the cooler months approach, it’s prime time for fall gardening to begin. Pulling bulbs for overwintering, planting new bulbs and winterizing your beds are just a few ways to set your garden up for success.

Read on to learn more about how to prepare your garden for winter and the next blooming season.

Plant your spring bulbs and seeds, trees, and shrubs.

Plants like tulips, daffodils, snowdrops, and crocuses need to experience cold temperatures before sprouting, while trees and shrubs benefit from the cooler fall temperatures and moisture to establish roots. Just make sure you put a decent layer of mulch on top of your bulbs and seeds or some intrepid chipmunks and squirrels might abscond with them.

Pull plants and bulbs for overwintering.

Unless you have all Michigan native perennials in your garden, chances are you have some plants and bulbs that need overwintering. Pull those plants and bulbs, clean them thoroughly, and store them in a cool, dark place over the winter. MSU Extension has some excellent tips on how to overwinter tender garden plants as well as container plants.

Water sufficiently before the ground freezes.

Watering isn’t just for the hot summer months. It helps perennial plants, especially trees and shrubs, pull up moisture during the dry winter months and reduces plant stress during harsh winter conditions.

To ensure your plants have sufficient water to get them through the winter, check if there is moisture below the top 8 inches of soil. If the soil is dry, make sure to thoroughly soak the ground around your beds, trees, and shrubs.

Cover up your topsoil.

To keep soil from drying up, insulate your plants from freezing, conserve topsoil, and provide a haven for beneficial insects and pollinators, cover your garden with a 3-inch layer of organic mulch. Be sure to leave some spaces in your garden without mulch in order to provide entry points for the beneficial insects and pollinators to find a place to hibernate over the winter.

Mulch that is made of leaves, straw, or compost is best as it will provide lots of nutrients to your topsoil as it breaks down. After the ground freezes, you can add an additional several inches of leaf, compost, or bark mulch for added protection.

If you use bark mulch, be sure that it is not dyed. Dyed wood mulch does not break down the same way as natural wood mulch, and can leach harmful contaminants into the soil that can hurt beneficial insects and your plants.

Avoid cutting back and deadheading.

During the summer months, deadheading and cutting back helps your plants generate new flowers and maintains the aesthetics of your garden. In the fall, however, let the last of the flowers, leaves, and stems die back naturally and stay through the early spring.

Unless you are treating a plant that has a disease or infestation, this will help the plant maximize the amount of energy it’s sending to its roots to sustain it over winter, and help it create an energy store to get a head start sprouting in the spring. It also provides additional places for pollinators to spend their winters and lay their eggs.

Come spring, when you start to see new growth, then the dead foliage can be pulled away and composted.

If you have a vegetable garden, plant a cover crop.

Cover crops are to vegetable gardens as mulch is to flower gardens. The biggest differences are that cover crops are significantly more beneficial to the soil, and you are essentially growing your own mulch.

Cover crops are typically planted in the late summer or early fall. Then their growth is either terminated, or they are left to die back. The decomposing stems and roots are left to act as natural fertilizer and mulch for the garden. The Midwest Cover Crops Council is an excellent resource for learning more about the best cover crops for our region.

Follow these basic housekeeping tips:

• Clean, sharpen, and store your gardening tools. Michigan State University Extension’s End of Season Gardening Tips includes more details on how to give your tools the best care.
• Put away any watering systems and shut off your external water to avoid freezing and damage to the system.
• If you haven’t done so already, cover your compost pile to keep snow out.
• Remove any diseased or insect-infested plant material and do not compost it. Some diseases and insects will overwinter, and you do not want to reintroduce them to your beds in the spring.
• If you have a vegetable garden, harvest and store your vegetables. The Old Farmer’s Almanac has a detailed list of typical garden vegetables, herbs, and berries, including their cold hardiness and how to prep them for winter.
• Take advantage of those end-of-season sales if you need to replace any tools, gloves, kneelers, etc.

Additional Resources

• Plantiful by Kristin Green
  Kristen Green highlights plants that help a garden quickly grow by self-sowing and spreading and teaches you how to expand the garden and extend the life of a plant by overwintering.
• How to Mulch by Stu Campbell
  Profiling a variety of techniques that include sheet mulches, feeding mulches, and living mulches, Stu Campbell and Jennifer Kujawski help you choose the best mulching strategy for your backyard, vegetable garden, or flower bed.
• Michigan Month-by-Month Gardening by Melinda Myers
  With this book, you'll know what to do each month to have gardening success from January to December. It's full of the when-to and how-tos of gardening along with richly illustrated step-by-step instructions, so you can garden with confidence.
• The Month-by-Month Gardening Guide by Franz Böhmig
  This is a compendium of practical advice for the home gardener, arranged by month.
• Encyclopedia of Gardening Techniques by the American Horticultural Society
  This book covers every aspect of gardening from pruning to sowing, watering to feeding, and propagating to planting. Covering all plants including trees, flowers, shrubs, climbers, lawns, vegetables, fruit and herbs; it also includes organic techniques, recycling and how to treat pests and diseases.
• Gardening Tasks through the Year by Andrew Mikolajski
  This practical guide gives advice on preparing the ground, sowing, planting, caring for plants, and harvesting fruit and vegetables, from early spring to late summer and into winter. Basic maintenance tasks are included.
• Gardening Month by Month by Ian Spence
  Whether you are a green-thumbed guru or are just starting out, you can ensure your plants are well cared for and that your garden blooms all year round.
• The Gardener's Year by Alan Titchmarsh
  This ideal gardening companion is not about quick fixes, design makeovers or hard drudge, but simply about knowing what you should be doing in your garden, when and why.
• The Essential Garden Maintenance Workbook by Rosemary Alexander
  With its step-by-step approach, this book is the next best thing to having a daily training session with an expert gardener. It allows gardeners at all levels to confidently tackle garden maintenance jobs, develop new skills and make a success of their gardens however stretched for time.