7 Tips How to Prep Your Garden for Winter and Spring

what's going on Gross it's James the only one coming to you live from Jersey today tuck and I are going to share with you seven

tips

for

winter

izing

your

garden

let's go for the first tip let's start with our raised beds for the Most of my raised beds I use for growing all

winter

, but let me show you what to do if

your

raised bed is finished for the season. I'll take you to this flower bed here to start. We want to remove everything dead and decaying. bed plants first though what I want to do look at this guy digging up some old carrots in there I guess we left some carrots in here so it looks like he's removed some of them but first thing I want to do is remove the dead plants and in rotting ones that have pest or disease problems like this zucchini here had some pest problems so what I want to do is take this out and then throw it right in the trash.

I don't want to put this in my compost pile because it might have some pest problems and things I don't want to spread around, so first things that have pest and disease problems we'll get rid of and throw them right in the trash after we want to for remove the rest of the dead and decaying plants and these wounds we can throw right into the compost pile notice that when I'm removing the plants I'm shaking off as much of the soil as I can so I'm just basically left with the plant and The Roots now I'm going to remove the wood chip mulch and set it aside for now because I'm going to cover this bed with compost and I don't want to bury the wood chips in there. come on all the dead and decaying plants are removed and now we can get some of the compost down now we want to start

prep

aring this bed for

spring

during the growing season we grow a lot of food here and it drained a lot of nutrients from the soil so to compensate So, what we're going to do is add a few inches of compost to the entire bed.

This is the perfect time to add our compost to the bed because during the winter the compost will break down and as it rains the nutrition from the compost will seep into the soil and this is great for the rainy season after our beds are covered with just compost then we want to add a layer of mulch this is important because this layer of mulch will help protect our beds from a harsh winter and it will also help suppress any weeds that are coming up another thing it will do is also prevent let weed seeds fly into our bed two great options for mulching your bed is to use leaves or wood chips which i prefer to use leaves because they are light, easy to handle and super easy to come by this time of year also in the Spring we're going to remove this mulch so we can plant right into the ground so the leaves are really easy to remove as well, but if you find you're out of mulch you can cover your bed with cardboard or even an old rug. bed here we go i have the whole bed covered in thick sheets now i'm just going to wet these sheets so they don't want to blow me away here we go this raised bed is fully winterized and it can be beautiful come

spring

now let's move on to a raised bed in which we're going to grow over the winter here's a raised bed that we're going to grow in all winter so let me show you how I winterize this one so the first thing we want to make sure is that when we have plants we have a nice thick mulch.

I like to use wood chips because they really help to insulate the soil a lot and protect those roots. Another thing we need to do is make sure we protect them. plants as it starts to get colder so this time of year when the nights are cold what I like to do is use a row cover this time of year because the row cover is so much easier to manage that the plastic once it starts to get really cold I add my two layers of plastic the two layers of plastic It works amazingly well because each layer of plastic will bring me a zone and a half so I'm in zone 7A with two layers of plastic which essentially allow to grow in zone 10A I like to wait to put the plastic on as late as possible because when you put the plastic on you need to make sure you go out in the mornings and raise this bed to allow for airing if you keep it closed with the plastic and the sun is out it's going to get really hot inside that bed and your plants are going to grow super long another thing that's going to happen is if you don't open up the bed enough and allow enough air to go through a lot of these plants and get in here then it's going to be super wet and humid to the point where it can start to rot some of your plants so I like to put the plastic on as late as Now that we know how to winterize our raised beds, next we are going to move on to the second tip, which is to make sure you harvest your baby greens while you can so when a frost hits our baby greens like our peppers and tomatoes are going to be gone forever so we want to make sure we get out there and grab them before the frost negatively affects them , so vegetables like these, your peppers, you'll want to grab them when they're green and you'll even want to grab them a lot of your tomatoes when they're green because tomatoes will ripen on the inside just put them in a warm dark place and they'll ripen slowly but even if they don't You want to wait for your tomatoes to ripen, you can still fry some green tomatoes and they are absolutely delicious, so don't forget to head out before the hard frosts and grab the rest of your snacks.

The third tip to winterize your

garden

is to winterize your perennials so this is going to take a different form based on the perennial we're actually winterizing when it comes to figs what I have to do is take my figs, tie them up, cover them up and then stuff the inside with leaves which I cover them with this insulates the fig tree and keeps it from dying over the winter when it comes to strawberries it's a little different so for my strawberries once that the ground freezes I'll take some straw or some leaves and drape it over my strawberries like this all winter long the strawberries aren't freezing then thawing if that happens that pushes the strawberries up and not we want that so one thing that is very important this time of year is that you don't do any pruning until your trees are completely dormant if you prune them in the fall when they are not dormant that will actually stimulate more growth because pruning it's a stimulant so if you prune you can get some new growth that won't be hard enough to survive through the winter so make sure you don't do any pruning this time of year you also want to save some of your fertilizing for your trees fruit trees until spring the fourth tip for winterizing your garden is to bring in what you can so we start with a series of herbs and pots early in the season in early fall this way we could bring them in when the winter starts strong frost.

We'll bring this inside, put it in a south facing window and you can have some cool. herbs all winter, it won't grow fast, but it's still so nice to have some fresh herbs. Another thing we can do is take some of our potted peppers and bring them inside to allow them to go dormant, then when spring starts to have big, established peppers ready to grow, the last thing we can do is take some of our herbs that are not cold hardy like this uh like this rosemary right here it doesn't always survive winters here so if we want we can dig it pot it up and then bring it inside let it dormant and then we can bring it outside and plant it in the spring in this way we will not lose it during a harsh winter.

The fifth tip to

prep

are the garden for winter is to remove the garbage, so if you grow fruit trees, one of the number one places that pests like the port and stay there is the fallen fruit. It is very important to remove all of this fallen fruit and not just throw it in the compost pile, but throw it in the trash. so another thing we want to do is the same thing with our raised beds, we want to make sure that we're removing any decaying dead plant matter that has any diseases or pests that we want to trash any decaying plant matter that we can't put directly in our compost pile also at this time we want to go around our fruit trees and see if there are any dead or diseased branches and remove them immediately and throw them away the sixth tip to winterize your garden is to plant your garlic let's talk some water here seems thirsty so around here fall is the perfect time to put your garlic in the ground because what we want is for our garlic to overwinter in the ground and then start growing the first nice days in the spring , so be sure to plant garlic at this time of year.

The seventh and final tip for preparing your garden for winter is to collect, apply and store mulch, so now is the time to go out and collect a bunch of mulch, so come on. spring comes summer it's hard to find good leaf mulch and other different types of mulch but now is the time people just leave leaf mulch on the side of the roads you can collect it all use it on your beds and even save it for spring and summer so use the time you have now when you're not in the garden so keep your eyes open and find some local leaves that you can store all winter long and then use them in your garden at spring and summer don't buy mulch when it just falls off the trees for free that's today's video Growers thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed it I hope you got something out of it me and talk to you about winterizing your garden as well i know it's like one of those things where you're not thinking about spring this time of year you're just watching your garden it's like slowly going to sleep getting sadder all the leaves are falling to the ground but now it's It's time to make the big investments that will pay off in the spring and summer.

If you want to have a great garden, you need to start work well before spring sets in, so preparing your garden for winter with these

tips

will greatly increase your harvest next year, but it will also make things much better. easy. We want to do as much work as possible. in the fall and winter like this when spring comes and it's peak season there's not so many things to do we can just focus on putting our plants in the ground and growing them instead of trying to get all our beds and all set to I think it's really worth doing a lot of the work in the fall.

Tuck had a lot of fun here with me. He is really starting to enjoy the cooler weather that we both did. He was very hot in the summer. This guy hasn't been doing. Great in the summer, the heat isn't necessarily good for this guy, now that he's getting a bit older, he's got some issues that I'll talk about in a future video, but we had a lot of fun, hope you did too. I hope you got some value out of this video and also know some fun, so what Tuck and I are trying to do, as we've talked about before, is to get as many people as possible to grow their own food and we want to cheer you on. . to expand your garden if you started one last year or just try to take a little more if you're smart about it if you prepare it right it won't even seem like much more work as long as you know you set the beautiful scenery to make things work so again we had so much fun we wanted to mention get some of the merch on jamespridgeoni.com the fall merch won't be around much longer so if you want a sweatshirt a shirt anything like that grab one we also wanted to say thanks for one from our new channel members Marianne monical i hope i said your name right and we are so grateful that you are contributing like i always tell you have your hand just make a little pan and all that we are doing back here so even though the leaves are falling and it's because it's fall there's still a lot of things growing we still have a lot of brassicas and things we need to harvest so the weather may be getting cooler but that's not stopping me and tuck we'll be back real soon