By Jennifer Fairfield, owner of the Garden Mill
Well, if I thought September’s weather was weird, I don’t know what word to use for October’s. We had temps in the 80’s at the beginning of October, cooled down to the 50’s mid-month, got almost to 80 again, and then it got plain old cold and miserable.
For a number of weeks, I was telling people to hold off on getting their bulbs planted, because it was still just too warm. That’s no longer a problem. Now I have to get my bulbs in the ground – both flowers and garlic. I also still have a bit of clean-up to do in my veggie garden.
Since it looks like gardening season has mostly come to an end, it’s time for cleaning up and packing up. Well, and maybe a little bit of gardening, too.
Vegetable Garden:
Pulling weeds out of the garden now will help cut down on what you have to pull in the spring.
If you’re like me, and have been putting off the chore of cleaning up your veggie garden, it’s time for both of us to get that task done. It’s better to do it now, when there’s some chance that it won’t be freezing cold. Pull any plants that are left and compost those that are disease-free. Trash plants that had signs of disease.
You can leave root crops such as carrots, radishes, and turnips in the ground over the winter, as long as you give them a really deep layer of mulch (such as straw or leaves) before the ground freezes. When you’re ready to eat them, pull back the mulch ad harvest what you need, then cover the rest back up again.
Plant garlic.
Varieties that are planted in the fall do best in our region. The overwintering helps them get bigger. When you plant them, be sure to work in some fertilizer that is higher in phosphorous, which helps promote root growth as the bulbs get started putting down roots in the fall. Cover your planting bed with a light layer of straw mulch to help keep moisture in. Then, once the ground is frozen, pile on a thick layer of straw – 6 to 10 inches is good. This helps keep the soil temperature consistent throughout the winter.
You can also plant peas and spinach at this time, to take advantage of the tendency of both of these to come up early in the spring. It’s harder to plant them early enough in the spring, because the ground is still so wet. Planting them in fall means you can get a much earlier harvest.
Flowers:
If you haven’t yet, it really is time to pull out any left-over summer annuals. The freezing overnight temps we’ve seen recently mean they’re pretty much done. Compost them, as long as they are not showing any signs of disease. Once you’ve cleaned out containers, store them somewhere where they will be out of the weather for the winter. You can leave them outside over the winter, if you take some precautions to keep them from filling up with water, freezing and cracking. You can move them to under a covered porch, or cover them with tarps, if they’re too big to move.
Mums are mostly finished now, as well, and can be composted if you didn’t plant them in hopes of getting them to come back next year.
Just as with the veggie garden, remove weeds from your flower beds to give you a head-start on next spring.
Once the soil has cooled down, add a layer of fresh mulch to your perennial flower beds to help protect the plant’s roots from frost heave this winter.
Plant spring-blooming bulbs. Daffodils, tulips, alliums, hyacinths, crocus, can be planted all the way up until the ground is frozen, but doing it now gives them a chance to get some good root growth gong while the soil still has some warmth. It also means it might be warmer for you, so you aren’t freezing while you’re out there planting. I recently came across a great article from MSU about planting tulips – written in 1982 (which happens to be the year I graduated from high school, so it’s kind of old!). The information in it is still relevant today, though.
If you’ve had problems with creatures digging up your bulbs in the past, try mixing them up with some baby powder in a bag (think “Shake-n-Bake”) before you plant them. Squirrels and such don’t like the smell of baby powder, so it might deter them.
(Publisher’s note: part two will publish tomorrow.)
