Get Excited For the Next Planting Season and Prepare Your Garden For Spring Now
Now that you’ve harvested your vegetable garden and canned a winter’s worth of food, you may be ready to sit back and put up your feet. With a little effort and time, you can prepare your garden for spring and make sure your dirt is prepared for the next planting season.
Clear out remaining vegetation. Once you have all your tomatoes, zucchini and peppers in from your garden, take time to clear out the remaining plants. Watch for signs of blight, mold or pests because your compost pile won’t get warm enough to kill them. You’ll need to either burn these plants or send them out with your household trash.
Take notes about what worked this year. As you clear out your garden, keep a notebook in your pocket. As thoughts occur to you about what worked well this year and what didn’t, jot them down in the journal. When it’s time to plant in the spring, you’ll have handy information about items such as how many of each variety you should plant, which plants fared best in which locations and whether any vegetables turned out to be a disappointment.
Prepare your garden with compost and mulch. Peel back your layer of mulch and then add a generous layer of compost. Recover it with mulch to help seal the soil against wind or water damage. Be careful not to layer too much compost and mulch because you’ll want the ground to freeze completely.
Conduct a soil test. This is a good time to check your garden’s pH level, lead content and soil nutrient composition. If you need to add any nutrients or lime to balance the pH level, it will have all winter to seep into your soil.
Expand your garden. It’s a rare gardener who starts small and stays small, so there’s a pretty good chance you’re thinking of even more delicious vegetables you could plant. Expand your garden by adding a raised bed, right on top of your grass. Fill it with soil and top it with mulch and you’ll be ready to plant in the spring.
Gather leaves for natural (and free!) mulch. Shredded leaves make the perfect mulch to suppress weeds and retain moisture over the winter months. You can also use it as the ideal brown element in your compost pile.
One of the best ways to prepare your garden for spring is by ordering Kincaid Plant Markers. Designed for a lifetime of gardening, they’ll add beauty to your vegetable garden year after year. Explore our entire inventory and choose the markers that fit your needs for your garden.
