If you’re a gardening enthusiast, you have probably wondered how to prepare your garden for summer and springtime. Because many avid gardeners struggle to figure out what to do with soil and plants by the end of the year, you’re probably not the first one to ask this question.
When your garden is done for the season you need to do the following. Prepare the soil for next growing season. Remove and get rid of dead or sick plants. Finally prepare for winter by storing yard tools away and adding protection to any plants that need winter cover.
How to prepare the soil for next year?
If you are planning to prep your garden soil for the following year, you would first want to know about the soil type. While the type of soil will vary depending on your geographical location, in the majority of the cases they range from sandy to moist, and excessively moist. Choose the soil type, depending on the type of plants you’re setting up. For instance, if the majority of your plants require well-drained soil, consider planting them in proximity. In the case of exceptions, you can always add potted plants by specifically customizing the soil type. Find out more about soil type in this article.
Most vegetables thrive well in well-draining soils, and they perhaps thrive weakest in windy zones with overtly sandy soil. In this case, the sand might blow up later eventually damaging your crops. Clay, on the other hand, is not an equally lucrative option because it holds plenty of water and barely lets air pass through the matter.
If you want a fully thriving vegetable garden throughout the year, make sure the soil is well-drained but also rich in high proportions of organic matter. You can easily identify quality soil by squeezing it in your hand. In case it turns into a hard ball, the soil is not ideal for your plants. The best kind of soil crumbles conveniently without developing any cracks when lacking moisture.
Having said that, you might want to follow the below guidelines to prep your soil for the upcoming months:
- Make sure the soil is a good mix of leaves, grass, and other organic materials. Make sure the soil mix is perfectly integrated at least a couple of months earlier. This will make way for decomposition and the soil will be ready over the next growing season. Because of this specific soil prepping requirement preparation, you might want to try it out during the winter months as you wait to plant your next batch in the next growing season.
- When it comes to manure, make sure it is perfectly composted for several days in advance. Additionally, you should perfectly integrate all the materials within the soil even before you use the soil to plant something. Avoid using fresh manure because it might end up ruining crops by decreasing your plant’s susceptibility to illnesses. As a rule of thumb, you should add at least 30 to 40 pounds of well-draining manure against every 100 sq feet of your garden.
- Ideally, compost should contain plant materials and other stuff that has decayed. For best results, you might want to use a combination of compost, sawdust, and green manure. Avoid using sawdust that hasn’t been composted yet because it ends up draining your plants of nitrogen eventually causing them to die. Also, while using green manure try to get natural counterparts like rye and oats that can be planted during the fall months and later be used during the Spring months as the green compost. Learn more about using compost in the garden in our post here.
What to do with the plants at the end of the year?
In case you’re just starting as a gardener and haven’t yet maintained plants for a full year, you probably want to know what to do with them during the fall, and subsequent non-growing months. Ideally, you try to preserve the seeds and plant some cover crops in the fall months. This also allows the soil to decompose keeping it just ready for planting during the growing seasons like summer and spring.
Either way, as a first step, you should still try to get hold of anything that’s still growing and leave them under plenty of sunlight. This applies to anything from herbs to tomatoes and even flower heads of sunflowers. If you have multiple herbs, tend them, cut them, and refrigerate them as an oil or anything you deem fit.
Next, you need to cut the last bit of the dried-out twigs and collect them in a proper container. This includes everything from dried-out branches to flowers and seeds. These will be later used as organic material while prepping up your compost. Learn more about creating your own compost here.
Finally, you need to throw these bits in your compost soil and allow them to decompose over the next couple of months. During this time, while the organic matter decomposes, you can always plant a bunch of cover crops in the compost pile.
While this will entirely depend on the soil type, your geographical location, and other external factors, most cover crops are usually a combination of different types of grasses and certain specific variants of legumes. You can also leave the soil untampered as the organic materials within it take time to decompose. Either way, because most plants die or dry out during the fall and winter months, you should follow this as a practice from the end of June.
Now that you have a clear idea about how to get your garden prepped for the summer months, you will probably have an easier time arranging the compost and doing all the mulching your garden needs. Because we also shared some guidelines related to prepping your soil, you can expect decent growth given you follow these guidelines. Either way, because most of these tips should be part of your gardening routine, you might want to follow them if you are looking for your plants to thrive for the longest time.
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