Five Fall Gardening Tasks To Save Yourself Time In The Spring

With the warm days of summer behind us and the cold of winter ahead of us, now is the time to finish up our yearly garden and landscaping tasks.

Doing these tasks in your garden will help you start off the season next year on the right foot. And, it frees you up from having to do them next spring when there are so many other things to do. How your lawn is going to look next summer is based on the work you put into it now.

Here are our best tips:

1. Fall is the time to remove the thatch that has built up in your lawn. There are multiple ways of removing thatch ranging from removing it with a heavy-duty garden rake or by using a powered device all the way to using Jerry Baker’s All Season Green-up Tonic, which will help the thatch break down on its own. Follow up the de-thatching with a fertilizer specifically made for winterizing your lawn. Fall is also a great time to declare war on those pesky lawn weeds.
2. Plant spring flowering bulbs like daffodils and tulips now and they’ll provide you with some early season color next spring. For your perennials with more sensitive roots and bulbs, it’s time to dig them up and store them in a dry, cool place for the winter. Gather up seeds of annual flowers to sew next spring either directly in the garden soil or start them early indoors.
3. It’s time to plant some of your next year’s food crop like garlic and rhubarb as well as enhance your landscape with evergreen shrubbery.
4. Whether or not you keep a gardening journal, it’s a good idea to draw up a sketch of your vegetable garden while it is still fresh in your memory. Next season you won’t have to guess where you planted things. While your thinking back on the season, you might also want to make note of what did or didn’t work for you in the garden this summer, like what plants you might want to move next spring.
5. Finally, clean up your garden beds by pulling all the dead annuals, whether vegetable or flower. Cut back the perennials and apply a generous dressing of compost or mulch to your beds to start the process of enriching the soil for next seasons crop. We use the bare space of the vegetable garden to create a big compost pile of yard and garden clippings that we turn as often as possible before the cold weather keeps us from doing so. The compost is then tilled into the garden soil in the spring.

Getting these tasks out of the way while the weather still allows is the best way to ensure a great start to your gardening next spring. When the snow starts flying, it’s a great feeling to know that your yard chores are complete.