Preparing Your Garden for Next Year

After harvesting your garden in the fall, it’s easy to think your work is done for the season. This isn’t the case, though. A great garden starts the fall before. Putting in some prep work before winter sets in can help get everything off to a great start come spring.
Essential End-of-the-eason Tasks
  • Remove all diseased plants from the garden and dispose of them in the trash. Do not add them to your compost pile. Getting rid of them completely minimizes the chance that pathogens will harbor in the soil over the winter and infect plants the following spring.
  • Let healthy plants stay. They’ll break down over the winter to add nutrients and organic matter to the soil.
  • Sprinkle a light fertilizer application on the soil like bone meal, rock phosphate, kelp meal, or blood meal. These organic fertilizers release nutrients slowly over the winter and will be readily available for plants in the spring.
  • Turn the soil, working it to a depth of about one foot. Turning it will work in that remaining plant material, speeding decomposition.
  • Remove any invasive weeds that sprouted during the growing season.
  • Prune perennial vegetable plants like asparagus and rhubarb.
  • Harvest finished compost from your pile and add new materials to regenerate it. The reactions will slow over the winter but may not halt completely.
  • Replenish mulch on the garden beds for the winter. Keeping the soil covered helps prevent weed growth in early spring and retains soil moisture.
Ways to Recharge Your Soil for Spring
Autumn is the perfect time to add raw organic material to the garden soil. Over the winter, these items start the decomposition process, so nutrients become available in the ground. When you plant your new crops in the spring, their new roots can quickly absorb them.
Common raw organic materials include fallen leaves or pine needles from your landscape trees and grass clippings from the final mowing of the season. You can also plant a cover crop after harvest to add “green manure” to the garden bed.
What is Green Manure?
Cover crops are planted solely to help the soil instead of being harvested. They typically help control soil erosion while improving moisture retention and preventing weed seed germination.
When these cover crops are tilled into the soil in late fall, they add organic matter and nutrients, improving the soil fertility and quality. Common green manures include legumes such as clover, beans, and peas, and grasses like oats, annual ryegrass, rapeseed, and winter wheat.