Prepping the No-Dig Garden Beds for Winter

Hey guys, welcome to This Ohio Farmhouse. I'm Jenna. Today I'm outside and I'm getting ready to go work in the garden because we only have a couple of days left of somewhat decent weather and then it's going to start turning and getting probably pretty gross. Normally in November we don't have the greatest weather in Ohio. It's very unpredictable and so I need to make sure that I get my last things buttoned up in the garden and get those beds all ready for winter because come spring we also have unpredictable weather and usually that means that I'm anxious to get out there and get going but the weather doesn't really allow me to do that. So if I get things done right now I usually can get quite a head start in the garden and so that's what I'm going to do. I want to make sure that I get all of the extra debris and things cleared out of here and then I also need to lay down a pretty thick layer of mulch and get things protected because you don't really want to leave your soil exposed to the elements all winter long. All right, I can't say that this was my favorite system of tying up the tomatoes. I really think that I needed a stronger support system up here for the size of plants that I was growing but for winter you want to make sure that you pull all of this stuff down and get it all out of here. Now we do what's called a no-dig garden which means that we are constantly trying to build our soil health without turning it up and rototilling. When you rototill you're actually bringing all of those weed seeds up and about and you get more weeds and so for the past few years we've really been trying to just leave the soil and the ground as God has created it to be and so in order to do that when I'm tearing my plants out I'm actually going to more so cut them down at the base and leave the root structure under the ground because those roots are going to help your soil over time. All right, one of the cool things that we have available to us is that I can throw my goats in here and they actually cleared out almost all of the debris. So now what I have left to work with is just some stalks. So I'm just going to come in here and break most of this stuff off and leave the roots in here. I will say the weeds are a different story. You want to pull your weeds out from the roots because a lot of times there's tap roots in here and those will grow back in the spring and so you're going to want to pull all of that stuff out right now. I always do this I forget to put my gloves on because I really prefer the feeling of it without but then I have gross hands. One of the cool things about no-till gardening also is that I really like this is starting to thin down the actual top layer of mulch here but all of this starts to turn into compost almost and it really becomes a really rich soil and so what we do is we just keep layering and layering and layering and we're going to continue to build our soil health. Now when we got started our soil really kind of stunk if you ask me. We had a really hard time even getting our garden going and so the more nutrients and stuff that we can put into our garden the better results we're going to have when we're actually harvesting. Since we started this deep mulching method my weeds have gone from me spending hours a day to really pretty minimal. You can tell the exact areas where I didn't get enough mulch down because that's where the weeds grow. Where it's nice and deep I had very few weeds grow in those areas and so this year I am going to pound it down and make sure that I have so much because it saves me an incredible amount of time just by spending the time to put the mulch down the way that I need to. Okay another thing that you need to do to get ready for winter is to make sure that you wrap up all of your hoses and things that are just kind of laying around outside. You don't want your hoses to be left out in the elements all winter you're just going to make them deteriorate and fall apart much quicker. So I have drip hoses that I'm going to start rolling up and get those put into the greenhouse for the winter. If you don't have drip hoses I highly encourage that you get them as soon as you can afford it. We put it off for a few years and oh my gosh I spent so much time outside watering my garden and this is a lifesaver. I would say the two biggest time savers in my garden have been heavy mulching and getting drip hoses. Make sure you don't leave any kind of things like this outside little plastic stakes or the little garden tags all winter. You want to just make sure that you clean out as much stuff as possible so the first thing in the spring you are ready to go. Right behind me you can see our little mulch pile that we pull from. We actually call several tree service companies and ask them if they by chance are in our area and they have mulch to get rid of that they would come and drop it off at our place. There are some really cool programs in place like chip drop. We've signed up for that and haven't ever had anything delivered but I do know of some people who have. So chip drop is maybe a place that you could start but if you're serious about it and you want to make sure that you're getting it we've had really good luck reaching out to some tree services because they have so much in abundance that they don't use and so oftentimes they're willing to bring it to you free of charge which is super awesome when you're trying to get a large quantity of mulch. Another thing we have really utilized them for bringing us logs and things that they don't have another place to get rid of and we use that for our wood burner and so last summer we just had truckload after truckload coming onto our property and just dumping firewood for us and that was a huge time saver for Ben. So I really like using the tree mulch though because I feel like it's the cleanest of the options for mulch. When you use things like straw it's oftentimes sprayed and so there is residue leftover and I don't really want that in where I'm growing my food but I feel like trees are often just left alone and they're not going to be being sprayed and so I feel like that's probably the cleanest option. Plus when a tree service is mulching they oftentimes mulch into that the leaves and things that are connected to the branches and they don't take time to separate that and that is ideal for a gardener because all of that puts nutrients and things back into the soil that are going to be really beneficial to building a good quality soil health. So highly recommend reaching out to a tree service and asking them if they would just bring you their mulch. So we have kind of come out and told them we'll take anything that you can give us because we'll use it. We did invest in a chipper and we do use that for cleaning up brush and debris that is on the property but it takes a lot to get the amount that we need and so I mean we could be chipping and shredding for days on end and it won't even touch the amount that we need just by using our own. Eventually maybe we'll get to that point where we can get ourselves a bigger chipper and put that to work a whole lot more often but for now it's really working out well for us to reach out to the tree services. All right so we're gonna load up, should be interesting pushing you with this, we're gonna load up some mulch and start covering the garden. If you already have your garden beds established and you have really good soil quality you really probably only need to put about three quarters of an inch to an inch of mulch on the top of that to protect it from the elements in the winter. If this is something that you're really trying to build the soil health up and give it lots of nutrients then you're going to want to put more like three to four inches. This is a garden bed that when we built this we actually put almost all compost in here and so this is a really great black soil. This is really healthy already, has lots of organic matter in here and worms and it's this is functioning really great. So I am going to only put just probably an inch over most of it but in this particular area it's going to go on a little bit thicker because this is where I planted my garlic. So when you do that it recommends that you put three to four inches of mulch on top of that so this area is going to be a little bit heavier. So I'm going to work on getting this spread out. Over the next couple of days I'm going to be working as hard as I can to try to get these beds buttoned up and finished for the winter so that everything is prepped and ready to go come spring when the weather decides that it's gonna allow for us to get in and start working the soil. So thanks for watching, we'll catch you next week on This Ohio Farmhouse.