Preparing Your Garden For Winter To Have A Better Spring Start
Shutting down one season while looking ahead to the next
This is always such an amazing time of year for food. The bounty of farms and gardens is being harvested and every market is bursting with fresh food and brilliant color. It’s a busy time for anyone trying to turn that harvest into food for the winter, with sauces and soups, and blanching and freezing, canning, drying and all manner of home-making going on.
But if you have a garden, there are also important steps to take that can help your garden transition into winter and be even better next spring than it is right now.
Here are some decisions to make that will affect how your garden wakes up next spring.
What to do with spent plants and garden debris?
Harvesting the fruits and vegetables of the garden is the primary directive at this time of year. That means worrying about the parts that aren’t edible usually comes later.
To pull or not pull - that is the question.
In some cases, you have to pull the plant out to get to the food. Potatoes, beets, carrots and other root crops are pulled out of the ground, leaving bare soil.
For the rest of the garden crops, the food parts are above ground.
Pulling plants and bare soil
Once the root crops are out, and if you choose to pull the rest of your plants out of the ground too, then you have a garden full of bare soil facing winter unprotected.
The downside of this scenario is that after all that time and effort you’ve put in to build up rich soil and a thriving soil community is now being laid bare. Churned up soil exposed to cold fall rains and blustery storms will lose nutrients fast and potentially blow away.
Some soil dwellers can migrate through the soil to deeper layers that won’t freeze. But others have had their winter shelters ripped away. They would have used that plant debris as part of their winter survival strategies.
So what to do?
Bare soil needs protection before winter.
Fast options include mulching with straw, shredded leaves, or even laying the pulled garden plants back down over the soil. These materials become the surface of the garden. The goal is to not see any bare soil. By keeping the soil covered, you are protecting it from erosion and providing some insulation for the soil dwellers.
You can also use row covers or plastic to protect the soil over winter. These will prevent the wind and rain from taking your soil away. Plastic might heat up on sunny days throughout the winter and this might burn up your soil dwellers and beneficials. Personally, I don’t like plastic in the garden because of it’s potential to leach toxic chemicals into the soil and plants. It’s not an option I would use in all, but a few specific cases.
A better alternative option is to grow a cover crop. Cover crops are living plants that protect the soil in ways similar to mulch - they cover the ground and their roots hold the soil in place so it is less likely to blow or wash away.
Cover crops can be seeded onto bare soil after harvest. Typical recommendations include plants like annual rye, buckwheat and clover. These plants are usually tilled into the garden soil in the spring a few weeks before planting begins.
If you don’t till, using cover crops like these can present a challenge. Their roots (and stems in the case of rye) can be hard to dig through using a shovel. More than once I’ve skinned my arms on the coarse sharp stems of rye while trying to turn it back into the soil- it’s not one I use anymore in my garden.
Alternative cover crops include many of the perennial herbs like oregano, thyme, and low growing flowers like yarrow. These plants provide a significantly easier spring start up in a home garden AND they provide useful food/spices along the way.
I also LOVE using brassicas as a fall cover crop for the same reason. If you save your own seeds, these is an especially cost-effect practice. Just sprinkle some of your favorites over the bare soil - arugula, mustards, radishes and kale are great options. Brassicas easily germinate in cool soil and they can readily provide a carpet of growth. You get some late season salad greens AND your soil covered at the same time.
Most brassicas will die-back in the cold weather, but some (like kale) might just shut down and start to re-grow early next spring - again, like the herbs, providing some early food.
Cutting plants and minimizing soil disturbance
The alternative route to go for plants with above ground food parts is simply to cut or twist off the stocks at ground level. This leaves those important plant roots in place, holding the soil and protecting it from erosion.
This strategy maximizes protection for soil dwellers and provides important below ground structures that can help beneficial organisms prepare for winter.
But with the tops removed, there may still be significant amounts of bare soil. Combining cutting plants down with mulching adds that extra protection to ensure that the soil stays covered and in place all winter long.
In the spring time, any remaining stems or roots can be broken up when you turn the soil to plant. You can minimize disturbance by only digging exactly where you want to seed and leave all the rest in place. Or you can turn your whole bed over and simply remove any big chunks of stems and roots to the compost pile in the spring.
Soil Health = Plant Health = Human Health
Protecting the soil after the fall harvests are done is as critical to the success of your garden, and to your own health, as having a garden at all.
If you are putting in the effort to grow your own food, and take steps to maximize the mineral and vitamin content of that food, then learning how best to care for the soil at the end of the season is worth a bit of time and effort.
Current industrial farm practices that harvest and till in the fall, leaving soils bare and exposed all winter and contributing exponentially to top soil loss, extensive weed growth, destruction of beneficial organisms and declining food nutrition.
My go to garden shut down move is to harvest up the quality food and then turn my chickens out on the garden for the winter. They are a feathered army of garden help that meticulously searches out the bugs and grubs, snips and nips off edible plant parts and occasionally churns up a soft garden bed to make a dust bath ( a small soil sacrifice for all the rest of the good that they do). And of course, they are walking fertilizer machines as well.
With my garden well seeded with brassicas, the only trick is to pull the chickens out early enough to let the brassicas work their early season, cold soil magic. And sometimes I put up a few wire cages around some herbs just to make sure the chickens don’t dig out the whole plants in their foraging enthusiasm.
Garden soil is our most precious resource when it comes to creating our health, wellness and longevity. Preparing the garden for winter doesn’t have to be an onerous end of season task. I like to think of it more as an act of love, that puts me ahead for a fast spring start up next year. As I clip and mulch and cover, I dream of my spring garden, and the changes I might want to make.
What’s your best fall garden shut down tip? Share it in the comments.