11 Winter Tasks To Guarantee an Abundant Garden Next Year

Believe it or not, it is actually winter here in San Diego in zone 10b. And there are a lot of things we need to do in this garden to prepare for winter. So in this video, we've got you covered from zones five to zone 10 as far as what to do for winter. Starting off with some tips for zones nine plus. We're here in 10b. Brianna and Chris on the team are going to share some zone five and eight tips pretty soon. But Jacques, we're staring at what looks like a season's worth of plants. Yeah, absolutely. In San Diego, we never get a hard freeze, which means that we could grow seedlings outdoors year round with no issue. And we actually have a bunch of brassicas, alliums, definitely a ton of onions and we're going to be transplanting all throughout winter into December with no issue. Yeah. And if you want, you can slow your garden down in a warmer climate, which we'll talk about right now. If you don't want to have a full growing season like we're doing here in winter, you can do something that we did right behind me in this corn patch last year, which was throw a bunch of cover crop seeds down. It's a great way to improve the soil, beautify the space and attract a ton of beneficials while not really doing much of anything as far as effort goes. And Jacques, you've got another solution. Yeah. And if you're in a warmer climate like we are, you could actually leave your beds unmulched if you want, because by having compost on top of your beds, that dark compost will soak up a bunch of extra heat and help your plants grow a little bit faster. Just a little extra option. Yep. So some warm climate tips. But now for those of you who are in a real winter, let's head over to Chris up in Vancouver with some Epic suggestions. Hey, it's Chris and up here in Vancouver, which is normally an 8B hardiness zone, we get our own flavor of winter. And although we don't get the really low temperatures, I would say we don't dip under 10 Fahrenheit or minus 10 Celsius. We do face another host of challenges when it comes to gardening in the winter, because it's usually quite mucky here. So the combination of wet and cold is a really bad thing to put your plants through. So we're going to walk through some of the things that I do in my garden to protect the plants. Before we talk about plants, a bit of general gardening housekeeping towards the end of the year. So I try to prioritize taking down my main season growing structures and tucking them into a sheltered spot because they are honestly serving no purpose other than providing a perch for the little birds that like to visit the garden to feed off the seed heads. So what I'm going to do right now is just remove this and tuck it into a spot that's not going to be exposed to a lot of cold and wet because with these wooden posts, if I can prolong their life and reduce the need for me to go out and buy more and more materials year after year, all the better. For any beds that I plan on growing winter food in, like in this big bed behind me, I usually set up a very simple low hoop tunnel using half inch PVC rebar to keep everything in place at the base. And also for the cover, I use a greenhouse polyethylene, usually a six mil thickness and also the greenhouse poly allows for plenty of light transmission to reach the plants. Now the simple structure, although it's very simple, they are quite effective with keeping the plants cozy and also keeping heavy snow from squishing the plants. So what you see right here is me kind of not being proactive and fast enough to cover the plants before the snow came a quick note on cover options. If you don't have access to greenhouse polyethylene, you can easily grab some vapor barrier from the hardware store, but depending on the manufacturer, there will be variations in how opaque it is. So that affects the light transmission and also the quality as well. And another option, if you live in an area that doesn't get mucky snow or heavy rains, and you're mostly just trying to protect your plants from light frost, then fabrics are a great option. There are different weights, so you can choose a product that works with the temperatures that you need to buffer your plants from. One of the best things that you can do in the fall to prepare the garden for the winter is to collect fallen leaves to use as free mulch. So I've got my wonderful red maple here and also a lovely hazelnut shrub. And both of these drop these really lovely sized, I'd say like medium sized leaves to use as mulch in the beds. So I try to avoid overly large leaves because they tend to squish together and smush down any plants that are trying to peek their way out of the soil. A simple rake is my tool of choice when it comes to collecting leaves because it's nice and quiet and also very gentle in case there are some overwintering insects already nestled in these leaf piles. What we really don't want to do is take a noisy leaf blower and just blast up all of these leaves, disturbing these overwintering habitats. And if you don't have access to leaves, straw is a great option for many gardens. So in my veggie beds, I have about three to four inches deep of this straw and it helps keep the soil nice and cozy. If you're like me and you like to experiment by growing neat plants that are just outside of your growing zone, meaning that they will likely not survive or do well in your area's coldest temperatures, then you need to think about what you're going to do with these plants because what I mentioned before with that cold and wet combination, it could be really disastrous for plants that are left out in the open in conditions that they're not really meant to withstand. So with these plants, whether it's the upper part or the bottom part, you need to protect them. Otherwise the plant tissue gets destroyed and come spring when everything thaws, you're just going to see a big pile of plant mush. Here I've got this really fun fruiting subtropical perennial that didn't fruit this year, but fingers crossed that I can get some fruit next year. So what I'm doing here is just cutting back the leaves, most of the stem and then digging out the root. And then I'm going to pot it up, give it a drink of water and tuck it into a frost free spot, likely the greenhouse. Now, not all of my plants need that level of protection. Many of the more established shrubs and trees will do just fine with a bed of mulch towards the base to protect the roots. But if you're in a colder climate, you do have to take extra precautions to make sure that your plants live through some pretty harsh cold conditions. So to learn more about what that looks like, let's head on over to Colorado to see what Brianna's doing to prepare her garden for the winter. Hey guys, as you can see, we've had our first killing frost. So here at the farm, we are actually a zone five, six. That means we get winter snow, we get frozen soil and there are lots of things that we do in the fall to help so that our garden is ready to go in the spring. So as our temperatures are getting colder, Chris is bringing some things into her greenhouse, but I just don't have a very big greenhouse. It's six by 10 and I need the whole thing to start my 14,000 seedlings for the farm every year. So I don't really grow a lot of stuff that I have to bring into winterize, but I do winterize some things in place. And one of those things are actually newly planted trees. So trees that are older don't need this, but newly planted trees. So for the first five years, they really benefit from having their trunks wrapped for the winter. That's because the fluctuation in temperatures and the sun exposure can be hard on tree trunks and we don't want them to split over the winter time. So we're going to wrap these up and then we'll remove it in the spring. Now, whenever we aren't able to get a cover crop in, if it gets too late in the season, or if we have a crop that's just growing too late to be able to cover crop, we also use leaves just like how Chris does. We don't mulch the leaves. We actually leave the leaves whole because there can be nesting pollinators and things in here that we don't want to chop up. So we leave them whole. We layer them thickly on top of the bed. I like to do it before we're going to get a snow because that helps weigh it down. If you're not going to get a snow anytime in the forecast, you can also use a hardware mesh to weigh it down or just some insect netting to help keep these from blowing away. But we like to do cover crops if we can get them in. And I'm going to tell you why. Here at the farm, we focus on regenerative practices. And that means that we're trying to build our soil and our soil fertility through natural processes as much as possible. So we don't use fertilizers. We don't use pesticides. We rely on diversity and we also rely on cover crops. So cover crops are a great way to bring biodiversity into your garden and to create a blanket for the soil over winter. So you can see that even though we've had a frost and a lot of our plants are dead, the cover crop is still growing because they're a little bit more cold tolerant. Now this is the 16 species cover crop that we've used here. And our sheep actually love to forage this down. But your cover crop is very flexible. So it kind of depends on what your goals are for your cover crop in terms of what you use. Each cover crop has a different purpose. So you want to think about your goals for your garden. If you plan to cover crop, think about what you're trying to accomplish. If you're trying to accomplish skipping the fertilizers next year, then you'll want to use a nitrogen fixer like a legume. If you're wanting to keep nutrients in your soil, you'll want to use something like oats. That's a nitrogen catch. And if you're trying to prevent erosion, there's lots of great cover crops for that. So thinking about those things is really key if you want to incorporate a cover crop into your garden. So for us here, we actually focus on planting something that's going to winter kill. That way we're planting this in fall. We're letting it grow for a little bit. And then once our temperatures dip down into the upper twenties, these cover crops are going to die back on their own, and it'll be ready to plant into in the spring. Here in my zone, fall means one thing, and that's a lot of leaves. Now we are seeing a movement where people are no longer raking and bagging their leaves as much, which is great because it's better just to leave them in place for the nesting pollinators. However, we do like to give people who are still raking and bagging a place to bring them. So we do a donation drop here at the farm and we use all of these leaves. We get over 500 bags a year. We apply them to our raised beds. We put them on top of the soil. We mulch around our plants. And then we also store some over the winter to make leaf mold in the spring. Now storing them can be a little bit tricky because of the wind. They tend to blow away. So what we do is we make leaf towers to help hold some of these in place so that we can have them in the spring. Once it's time to use them. Let me show you how we are back here in the compost bin area of the farm. And this is where we store our leaf towers. These leaf towers are a great way to store our leaves in place until the spring, just to keep them from blowing away, because it is great to have them in the garden as mulch or to make leaf mold. And we also use them a lot in our compost bin. So leaves are our primary Brown ingredient because we have so many of them here. So as you can see, these leaf towers are just made out of bunny fencing, which is a wire fencing that is smaller down at the bottom and it's bigger up top. So being smaller at the bottom helps to hold all that organic matter in as it breaks down. And it's nice because there's also air circulation happening in here. Now in our zone, it's pretty dry. So we really don't get any composting of this when it's just Brown. They just kind of sit here. Um, but as we add them to our compost pile, they break down and they become wonderful compost, or you can just use the leaves and make them into leaf mold. All we do to make these is we take our bunny fencing. We shape it into a circle and we tie the ends together just by folding the wire over. It really couldn't be easier. We put some compostable leaf bags in the bottom of these just to help keep weed growth down. And then we fill them up with leaves. We leave them until the spring or we throw them into the compost pile. The final thing that I like to do in the fall is to prep all of my garden beds for the spring. So when we're searching new planting areas, especially I like to let those new planning areas kind of age over the winter. And so we're actually doing a trial this year. We're doing three different methods. We're doing a lasagna bed, a no dig bed and my own method, which I call the native soil method. And we're going to do a comparison of how they all do in the spring, prepping them in the fall. Just gives you a little bit of a leg up in the spring season because you're not having to try to rush to get your garden beds prepped before you can get them planted. Especially for us, we tend to have kind of wet and soggy springs and that can be a really bad time to be out and working your soil. So I really prefer if at all possible to prep new planting areas in the fall so that you're ready to go come spring. Jacques and I have a ton of winter planting to do, but if you do want to see a full guide on cover cropping, especially in raised beds, check our guide out. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.