Now that the holiday season is over, whether you are starting your garden for the first time or you have a couple of green thumbs, you know winter time is when you lay the foundation for the upcoming growing season. If you are as excited as I am to get started with your garden consider these five essential tasks to help make sure your garden is prepared for success!
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#1: Clean Up an Existing Garden Beds
I have not been looking forward to cleaning up my beds, and really up until recently, there hasn’t been much to clean up. My fall beds look great, and while my summer beds are about spent, they were still producing some tomatoes and peppers since as of the end of December, we still did not have a hard frost. If my plant babies want to live and keep providing food, I’m not going to stop them.
That won’t stop me now with the hard frost in sight. We have things we need to get done! I’ll pull up any plants that were not part of my fall garden. Anything that might be diseased (has blight or veticillium wilt) will go into a separate pile or be disposed of, while those that were healthy until the freeze will be composted.
It’s also a good idea to check your leaves before you compost your plants for any pests. My squash plants that I loved so dearly, and planned to compost were covered in aphids, and the bok choi that I had left to go to flower for the season (for the pollinators of course!) was covered in cabbage loopers. Those are not pests that I want to deal with next year, so the compost pile is not the best place for them, though I’m sure they’d mind their 5 star bug hotel.
While you are also cleaning up your garden, it’s also a good time to pick up any fallen fruit or produce. In the next several weeks you will be making sure that your beds are in great shape for the new season, and those fallen fruit may become volunteers for the next season.
This may be a good or bad thing for you depending on what you are looking for. In our case, we have had dozens of cherry tomatoes that have fallen off the vine. While I do love them, with them being hybrids, they will not produce true to the original plant nor do I want dozens of them next year. Cleaning up the fruit can be a good way to keep you from having weed later on.
#2: Test Your Soil
If you gardened last year or if you are new to gardening in a particular area, it might be beneficial to test your soil. To ensure all of our plants have the nutrients they need, it can be helpful to know what they are missing in your soil. That can hopefully give you an idea of what fertilizers you will want to add and in what proportions.
When we first tilled my dad’s backyard, I had no idea what it looked like for its soil composition. I knew he had been gardening for a while off and on over the years and did little to add much to it or what he did was largely synthetic fertilizers. I wanted to be able to test to see what nutrients were still in the soil. I did not want to do anything expensive, which is why I opted for this soil tester.
It was able to give me a rough overview of how much of the major nutrients, Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium (NPK) is in the soil. They also had a method of testing the organic material and types of sedeiment and pH which was helpful. We have blueberry bushes so testing the pH of that soil was able to help make sure our plants were happy and healthy!
This soil nutrient test showed that the soil was very low in Nitrogen, Phosphorous, but still had a decent amount of Potassium.
Based on these results, I knew that it needed more nitrogen and phosphorous based fertilizer. Trying to go the organic approach for gardening, I purchased some blood meal (almost pure nitrogen) and bone meal (mix of mostly phosphorus and some nitrogen). I am not brand loyal, but do prefer Espoma, Burpee, or Down to Earth Brand when possible since they have reliably provided fertilizer that has helped our plants be their best selves.
We amended it to the soil in the spring, but unlike synthetic fertilizers, it takes a while to break down to be available for plants. In the winter it will be even slower. Since it is winter time, I will only add half of the recommended amount on the package.
The good news is with the soil test, while it does not test for micronutrients (like the ever important calcium!), it does give you several tests so you’d a test again in the spring or fall.
I also tested my grandparents who actively farm and garden in sandy soil in the Red River Valley area of Oklahoma. It’s truly astonishing how different these soil tests are! You can see it is very nutrient poor and also has little to no organic matter. Likely due to the fact that they till several times a year to get rid of weeds.
Because they ranch even more than they garden, and their hay production has been at an all time low, I wanted to encourage my grandparents to use science to help support their ranch. I purchased them an in depth mail in style soil sampler that shows the micronutrients and recommendations. Also no surprise, their hay meadow was also nutrient poor. That was enough evidence for them to fertilize, even if it was synthetic. They went from harvesting 60 bales of hay last year to over 200 this year. So the soil tests do work.
#3: Prune Plants and Perennials
If you have perennial bushes, plants, or trees, this is a great time to remove damaged, broken, or old branches. Some berry bushes like some varieties of black berries, raspberries and currants need to pruned back to keep them from being unwieldy and so they can grow on new growth.
If you are just removing old branches you can also consider chipping your healthy branches, just make sure there are no diseases present in the plant, to reduce the risk of spreading it to your garden beds. We used this chipper to create 1-2” chunks of pecan chips after a lighting strike hit one of our branches. This will make a great mulch for our plants and can also provide a material for a trail. We also use it for smoking meat for our BBQ and intend to use some of the chips for helping grow and cultivate mushrooms.
#4: Mulch Your Beds
When it’s that day of the week (or month, I don’t judge!) that you take the sheets off of the bed in your house, you don’t leave it that way. You clean it out, and then you remake it. The same should be true for your garden beds. Life doesn’t stop for the winter, and keeping your soil healthy doesn’t have to be difficult.
I look for reasons to not do work, and while I would love to not rake any leaves, I know that is not the best idea. We have a pecan tree and it drops more leaves than we know what to do with, or it did. Now we will rake our leaves so it doesn’t kill what little grass we have in our backyard, but instead of bagging them up to go on the side of the curb, they will be used as mulch for our garden beds.
A lawn mower can be an easy way to break down larger leaves and make it fine enough that the worms and other decomposers in your garden bed. Simply use a bag attachment with your lawn mower to help you collect some grass clippings and the leaves then you can add directly to your garden bed.
If you saved your wood chips from trimming your perennial plants earlier, this can be a good way to use an other wise waste product to help mulch your plants. By mulching them with wood chips you can provide your soil with more carbon, feed your soil for the winter, and keep them warm.
#5: Purchase Any Seeds
If you plan on starting seeds for the new season, this is a good time to start buying any seeds that you might want to plant. Local nurseries can offer great varieties specific for your area, but you can also find a wide variety of plants from online websites such as Burpee, Baker’s Creek, and Botanical Interest. Purchasing now will ensure that they have time to be delivered and have enough time to start your seeds inside.
These five essential tips for January will help ensure your garden plan will be successful and keep you sane instead of doing everything last minute. Do you have any tips that were missed? Do you mulch or prune your plants this time of year? See why January is the Best Time to Plan Your Garden! Share your gardening tips for January in the comments below!