Closing down the garden for the year
Closing down the garden for the year.
Who says you don’t get a lot of exercise working in the garden?! Frankly, I find it to be an incredibly good workout! Think of all the aerobic exposure you get hauling mulch bags, digging weeds, moving rocks out of the beds and planting pathways. AH! I really enjoy my little plot of green.
Alas, it’s basically September. The zucchini are all gone. I’ve got a few peppers, eggplant and tomato’s left. The acorn squash have all been picked and are now on their way to the garage where they’ll be stored until I get hungry and in the mood to slice them open, slap in some honey and brown sugar and slide them into the oven.
I’ve spent the day pulling the old weeds out and reworking the plastic ground covers I use over the raised beds. They tell me it’s supposed to keep the weeds out of my garden. They lied. It does help reduce the load, but I also find that there’s some incredibly tenacious ones that will find their way either around or right through the plastic top liner and send up sprouts and plant roots. Generally where I least want them
After I clean out the beds, I prepare them for winter. What I do is to put a full fertilizer feeding in each bed. Generally I use a generic general purpose fertilizer on the line of 10-10-10. But, I put it on substantially heavier than I would for a feeding when there’s plants in the beds. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking layering fertilizer on the ground like I would peanut butter on a PB&J sandwich! But, I usually put 2-3 times the amount of feeding that I would put down in a normal feeding. Were I to put this concentration down with live plants in the beds, it could seriously damage them.
My rational is this: These beds will be unoccupied over the fall, winter and early spring. That’s probably a good seven or so months. During this time I fully expect that mother nature is going to drench the earth well with either rain or snow and process will take the nutrients down into the soil where by sping it will be deep enough and a low enough concentrations that the plants will really enjoy it and the nutrients will be down where the roots will be growing and doing their thing. Yeah, I’m inherently a lazy gardener and if I can get mother nature to do some work for me, I will. Why not?
In the spring when it’s planting time, I’ll put a light feeding on the ground after I’ve put the plants in. This will dissolve and supplement their needs through the growing season.
The same holds true for my lawn. On Thanksgiving weekend, I’ll put a heavier layer of good ole 10-10-10 down on the lawn. This isn’t heavy enough to burn the grass or the ground, but it’s heavy enough that the cold winter’s precipitations will slowly dissolve the nutrients into the lawn soil so that once things warm up in the spring, the plants already have the nutrients right where they want them. Down in the roots.
With a little thinking, planning and help from mother nature, you can have a great garden and lawn and save a lot of time and dough in the process. It’s all in the planning. Just don’t get heavy handed with the fertilizer as this is truly a situation where giving them too much doesn’t make for merrier plants.
For more help, contact your local garden center.
I’m Don Rima and that’s the way I see it, From Where I Stand.
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