Plant and Soil Care

When you’ve worked hard all spring and summer to cultivate a beautiful flower or vegetable garden, it can be tough to see the growing season winding down—especially if you’re a beginner outdoor gardener who’s been enjoying their first year of green-thumbed triumph! Fortunately, if you take proper care of your plants and your soil each fall, you can look forward to many more triumphs in the years ahead.

The extent of your fall garden preparations depends largely on geography. As a gardener, you should know what hardiness zone you live in (ranging from Zone 1, the coldest, to Zone 11, the warmest). You will experience the best success, by far, in having your landscaping plants survive the winter if you have planted species that are well-suited to your zone. Still, if you live in a climate that features long, cold and probably snowy winters, or hard frosts, there are several steps you should take to maximize your success.

Bringing Outdoor Plants Indoors

If you have a vegetable garden, the harvesting season will likely have come and gone by the time you’re worrying about cold-weather damage, so the question of bringing plants inside for the winter applies, of course, to flowers, trees and shrubs. The following are general guidelines, but again, what hardiness zone you live in is significant—for example, some perennials can be left outdoors in some climates but not in others.

Shrubs and trees that grow in the ground should be hearty enough to survive the colder months, but you may want to consider bringing potted shrubs and trees, especially young fruit trees, inside. If this isn’t feasible one of the best winter gardening ideas for the fall is providing insulation and warmth for the roots by wrapping the pots and moving them closer to the outside wall of your home.
Not surprisingly, any outdoor tropical plants, such as oleander and hibiscus, should be brought indoors well in advance of the first fall frost. Many other flowering plants, including azaleas and rhododendrons, can do well indoors through the winter, but others, such as geraniums, should be put in cold storage.

If you live in a climate cold enough to warrant bringing some of your outdoor plants indoors for the winter, they probably won’t be at their height of magnificence during this time due to the reduced amount of sunlight they receive. Therefore, it’s important to place your pots strategically, in a room that receives a lot of light and near a window if possible. Also, you can encourage winter growth on magnolias, fruit trees and other plants you’ve brought indoors by forcing blooms on cut branches.

Preparing Your Garden for Winter

Any gardener who has undertaken the autumn ritual of preparing their garden to endure the winter and be at its best the following spring has probably found themselves feeling like the hard-working ant in the fable of the ant and the grasshopper: you have to put in the effort right now, but that effort will pay off later, when your garden survives through winter and into spring.

One thing you can do to help your outdoor plants through the winter is to provide a windbreak, a physical barrier between them and the elements. Although landscaping plants like hedges can also be helpful in keeping the cold winter wind from hitting your plants with full force, a foam, burlap or other type of wrapped or blanketed windbreak can be an excellent defense against freezing wind and weather.

Another one of our great garden ideas for the fall is the use of mulch. Whereas earlier in the year mulch helps to control weeds, in the fall it provides a layer of protection for your plants. Repeated freezing and thawing of the ground can be just as detrimental to your plants’ winter survival as freezing alone because cyclical freezing and thawing causes the ground to heave, pushing root systems closer to the surface or even exposing them, making them vulnerable. Mulch insulates the soil against temperature extremes.

Finally, if you have a flower garden, one other activity you can undertake to prepare your garden for a great new year is to plant bulbs for spring, such as tulips, narcissus, hyacinth and crocus. These will help bring life back to your garden and outdoor rooms as soon as the warm weather returns.