Guest Post: Protecting your Garden during the Winter months

March 15, 2010 by Brenda
Filed under Allotments & Gardens, Featured Posts, Home & Garden

Getting Your Garden Ready for Winter

Even though plants are not producing leaves, flowers, or fruit during the winter months, the plants in your garden are more active than you think. During the winter months most of the plant’s activity occurs underground.

Trees, shrubs, perennials, and bulbs are busy growing roots during cold weather. Plants that are not killed by frost are preparing for dormancy during the winter months. To help your plants get ready for winter you will want to make sure that you clean up and cover up. This will help ensure that your plants survive the winter months and emerge as healthy, insect free plants in the spring.

Steps to Take to Protect Your Garden

Clean the Garden – It is important to cut back the dry stems of perennials and foliage from evergreen plants and shrubs. You will want to cut the stems of the perennials to soil level. By doing so, you are ridding the garden of any diseases or insect eggs that may still be lingering on the decomposing plant. Discarding old mulch is a good idea, too.

Condition the Soil – Ideally you will want to condition the soil with an organic soil conditioner. A good organic soil conditioner is comprised of composted plant debris. This will help to kill any weed seeds that may be in the garden, and it will also help to kill harmful pathogens as well.

Add Mulch – You will want to add approximately 6 inches of organic material to your garden, which will serve as winter much. However, you will want to wait to do so until the ground freezes. Adding the layer of mulch too soon will provide an excellent nesting area for any number of rodents. By waiting for the ground to freeze before adding the mulch rodents will be less likely to nest in your garden.

Additionally, you can use pine needles or leaves to much perennials and shrubs. Evergreen boughs can be used to much bulb beds. By doing so, you will be protecting the plants’ roots as well as the soil.

Wrap Plant’s Stems and Trunks – You can use wire or other products designed to protect the stems of plants or bark of young trees during the winter months. Without this protection animals may be tempted to gnaw on these plants, which can be very damaging to the plant.

Todays guest post has been written by Emma Spivey who writes for solar outdoor fountains , her personal hobby blog focused on tips to
design an eco-friendly garden to protect wild fauna (mostly birds).

Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)