By Helen Kobek | From BayLines Express, October, 2021
If you’ve had a garden this past Spring, Summer, and into the Fall, you might be looking towards getting it ready to make it through the winter. Hard freezes damage most plants – any plants that favor warmer weather. Their tissue just cannot handle the cold bite. If you winterize your garden, it will be in good shape to greet you come the Spring, readily welcoming new plantings, ready to nurture and nourish new plant growth.
Unlike creating, planting, weeding, tending, and harvesting your garden (see an article I wrote for the April 2021 issue about how to garden by feel) winterizing your garden doesn’t require much detailed tactile agility or discernment. You’ll just need to use your personal blindness skills to follow the steps below.
Here’s how to winterize your garden:
First step: Pull out remaining plants.
When you know a hard freeze is looming (you’ll likely know days before), pull out any plants remaining in your garden. You can leave the roots there if they don’t come out easily. Leaving the roots helps nourish the soil, and this nourishment continues – albeit slowly – during the winter. If you can create compost of the plants you’ve removed, all the better.
Second step: Amend your soil.
Ready your soil for the Spring by adding some rich amendments, raking them down about two inches. The Spring rain will drive the nutrients deeper. How to amend? Test your soil for what’s has become depleted with use. It might be nitrogen (important for leafy green plants). It might be potassium and phosphorous (important for root vegetables). It might be that you need to balance your pH to make it more or less alkaline/acid. Amending your soil pH is especially helpful if your garden will not be planted for the winter, as it gives the soil time to absorb the pH balancers. The balancers will be lime or sulfur.
Go ahead and add some good quality compost, working it in. But no need to bother with adding fertilizer. The compost will continue to produce beneficial bacteria during the slow winter, but fertilizer will only be used up and need to be reapplied in the spring, right before you plant. So hold off on fertilizing until right before you plant.
If you wish to winter over some plants, you can do that, and all plants that endure winter can do just fine without covering. Kale is a good example. So, if you are going to winter over such plants, you’d want them to be established and mature before winter sets in. If you feel better about it, you can install a hooped structure to try to keep the snow lifted off, but the structure would need to be quite strong to hold up under the snow. Better to mulch (see the next step) snugly around the base of wintering over plants, and wish them well. You might want to resist checking on them during the winter, as you will likely feel discouraged: Your plants will look slumpy, sickly, still green, but weak. They are kind of struggling, but they are hanging in there. Know that 90% of them will survive to greet you plucked up in the spring.
Some edible weeds, like chickweed, continue to grow in the winter, albeit slowly. So if you have a lot of chickweed sprawling around that you’d like to keep, don’t mulch over them, as they need the sunlight during the winter.
Third Step: Mulch.
The idea of mulching is not to nourish, but to add a little ease from the bite of cold. It also keeps the soil from deteriorating under snow and rain. Soil deterioration is less an issue if your garden has structured raised edges holding the soil in place. Cold bite is a bit more a risk if you have raised beds because the soil freezes more readily if it’s not embedded in the surrounding ground.
You can mulch with wood chips, shredded leaves, straw (not hay – that’s for animal consumption), or pine needles. (If you grow food organically, be sure to use mulch that’s not pesticide treated.) Lay down a layer of several inches on the soil, not raking it in. Then leave the mulch there until you are preparing to plant. You can then remove it, but it’s fine to leave some of it – a fine layer – in place so you don’t lift up nice soil. Rake in that fine layer of mulch. You can use the mulch to add loft to your compost bin, if the mulch isn’t too wet when you remove it. And then get new mulch for the following season.
And, of course, you’d plan to plant after the last winter frost. If you’d like, you can start plants inside under grown lights during the late winter to jump start your Spring planting!
And, January is when many seed catalogues come out, so get your sighted people (or Aira or BeMyEyes) around you and start dreaming about and ordering for your next gardening season!
If you do not winterize, your garden will still welcome plantings in the Spring, but winterizing will give you a healthy jump start. You can think of garden winterizing as being like what we in certain climates do to ready ourselves for Winter — stow our fans or AC’s, turn off our outdoor spigots, bring out our gloves, hats, and winter coats, dust off our heating coils, and snuggle in for the months ahead. By winterizing, we can invite our outdoor community – that has fed us all Spring, Summer, and Fall – to get through to the other side with us, ready for Spring and a joyful next season.
Happy Winter, gardeners!