How to Winterize Garden Beds for Beginners: Everything You Need to Know
Fall is here, and it's time to begin thinking about winter in the garden. It's important to protect your garden beds, so the garden is ready to come back to life in the spring. Join gardening expert Melissa Strauss to go over the essential tasks to winterize your beds.
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Winterizing your garden beds is a vital part of protecting your plants and the soil they grow in. As the temperatures start to drop, we too should get started. It’s important to clean up, feed, and insulate your beds from weather, pests, diseases, erosion, and nutrient loss.
When you winterize your garden beds, you protect the ecosystem and prepare plants for a healthy, productive spring growing season. The combination of freezing and thawing cycles, cold temperatures, and winter moisture can take a toll on your beds.
The results of neglecting these tasks include damaged roots, compacted soil, and depleted nutrients, among other things. If you winterize your garden beds properly, you can drastically mitigate, if not fend off, these issues entirely. Follow these steps to ensure that your garden beds remain in good condition throughout the seasons.
Clean Up
To winterize your garden beds, you first need to get them cleaned up from the growing season. This is a multi-part task that starts with taking care of any annuals that need to go. Removing the spent annuals and vegetables gives you a better idea of what you have in front of you.
Pulling out your spent annuals is important to keep pests and diseases from overwintering in your beds. Some gardeners like to pull the plants out entirely, while others prefer to cut them off at the soil line. This leaves the roots intact, which can feed and improve the structure of your soil.
Next, cut back any perennials that you don’t intend to leave standing for the winter. Some of these have decorative qualities, and others provide food and shelter for wildlife, so make your selections carefully. Leaving seed heads behind, along with some hollow stems, will make the pollinators and birds happy.
Finally, do a thorough weeding, removing any leftover weeds as these can cause their own problems. It’s good to get rid of them before they’re able to drop seeds, because that is how more weeds find their way into your garden.
Test and Amend the Soil
Fall is an excellent time to test your soil and give it a refresh with some carefully selected amendments. This is one of the most important steps to winterize your garden beds. A soil test will let you know the composition and nutrient content, as well as the pH, which is important. Many plants can’t absorb the nutrients they need in alkaline soil.
This is the time to amend that soil. Don’t wait for spring. Most amendments need several months to break down and integrate. If you need to raise the pH, add lime; to lower it, add sulfur. If you need to beef up the nutrients or break up compacted soil, add some compost. Compost is also great for increasing the moisture retention of sandy soil.
Mulch
Mulch is a valuable substance when you winterize your garden beds. It serves quite a few important purposes. For one thing, it insulates the soil, keeping the roots of your perennials cozy.
A layer of mulch goes a long way towards regulating the temperature of the soil, which prevents frost heaving. This is when the repeated freezing and thawing of the soil heaves the roots out of the ground. It can do a lot of damage to your perennials, bulbs, and shrubs.
Mulch reduces evaporation, which helps your soil conserve moisture. This is helpful when the ground freezes and it’s more difficult for roots to absorb moisture. It also protects plant crowns from harsh conditions like frost and wind.
Finally, mulch helps to control erosion. If you have beds that are mostly annuals, when you pull those, there will be little leftover to hold the soil in place. Mulch does precisely that. It also suppresses weed growth and enriches the soil as it breaks down.
There are many types of mulch you can use in the garden. Wood chips are, of course, easy to find and look nice. However, if you have a lot of space to cover, they can get pricey. Shredded leaves, straw, or pine straw are all good alternatives to winterize your garden beds.
Wrap Tender Plants
An important task to complete when you winterize is protecting your more sensitive perennials. While many plants have hardy roots, some will need protection if you don’t want them to die back over the winter. Wrapping them will help preserve and protect them from the harsh weather.
After the ground freezes, but before the coldest days set in, wrap your shrubs in burlap or frost cloth. It’s important to winterize the shrubs that bloom on old wood, as they already have their buds set. Wrapping them will protect the buds for a better bloom in the next season.
To winterize your tender perennials and those that are on the borderline, loosely wrap them in breathable fabric. You can also pile straw, leaves, or pine needles around the base to give them a little extra insulation.
Tropical plants are tricky, depending on where you live. I’m in zone 9, and my in-ground tropicals die back over the winter. Their roots survive, but I do lose a lot of growth every year. You can wrap these if you feel confident that they will make it. Otherwise, I highly recommend placing them in some type of shelter.
Water Before a Freeze
This is a way to further winterize your plants when the time comes for the ground to freeze. A mere frost is unlikely to cause much root damage, but a hard freeze certainly can. To combat that damage, it’s important to water your plants ahead of time.
For one thing, hydrated plants are simply stronger and better able to endure stress. But watering before a freeze goes deeper than that. Moist soil absorbs heat from the sun and then slowly releases it at night. Dry soil doesn’t do the same. Pockets of cold air in dry soil can do a lot of root damage. In addition to mulch, this is another way to prevent frost heaving.
When you see that extra cold weather on the forecast, don’t wait until the last minute. Water deeply a day or two before the anticipated event. This gives the roots and soil time to absorb the moisture. Focus on watering the root zone, and not the foliage.
The exception is if the soil is already moist. You don’t want it waterlogged, as that can also harm roots. If you have rain coming in before a cold snap, that is nature’s way of accomplishing this. The ground will already be moist, and you won’t need to worry about it!
Cover Crops
If you have beds that are bare for the winter, mulch works as a cover to prevent erosion. But that’s not the only way to winterize an empty garden bed. Cover crops are a wonderful way to accomplish this goal, and they do a lot for your garden, as well.
In beds where you grow your summer vegetables, cover crops do more than just help hold down the fort. They also enrich the soil, making it a more hospitable place for those summer veggies next year. Plants like rye, clover, wheat, oats, field peas, or hairy vetch are all great choices.
These plants serve a host of purposes. We know they help to control erosion and benefit the soil, but how? Well, for one thing, many of these crops are nitrogen-fixing, so they actually replace the nitrogen in your soil. For beds where you grow tomatoes, peppers, squash, and other heavy feeders, this is a major benefit.
The root growth of your cover crops does more to winterize than merely control erosion. They also feed the beneficial organisms in your soil. And they shade the soil, so they work as an excellent weed suppressor in early spring.
Before planting in the spring, you can till them in or cut them down to use as green mulch. This is yet another way that cover crops benefit the garden. They improve both the fertility and structure of your soil. Plant these four to six weeks ahead of your first hard frost so they have time to establish.
Inspect Raised Beds and Irrigation
Caring for your plants and soil is a great way to winterize your garden beds, but what about the beds themselves? If you’re a raised bed gardener, make sure you give those beds, as well as irrigation and any other structures, a once-over.
When it comes to beds, metal lasts longer than wood, so there will be fewer problems. Check to make sure that everything is holding together and tighten any bolts that need attention. Look for bowed sides and reinforce them if necessary.
Check your wood beds for signs of rotting boards, loose joints, and shifting corners. These are caused by moisture and soil pressure, and sooner or later, they happen to most beds. Tighten things up, replace rotting wood, and reinforce the corners if they need it.
Treat the soil in your raised beds the same way as your in-ground beds. Over time, soil washes out of beds, so now is a good time to give it a refresh and replenish. Add some compost and then spread a layer of mulch on top to keep things snug for the winter.
Finally, winterize your irrigation systems by inspecting and giving a tune-up. Water stored in tubing can freeze and cause cracks. It’s best to disconnect and drain your hoses and store them indoors if possible. Make sure to attend to your timers, and don’t leave irrigation systems running through the winter.
Insulate any faucets and backflow preventers to prevent freezing, and for permanent systems, blow out the lines and open the valves to drain them. A little attention to these things goes a long way toward saving yourself time and money in the coming years!
