If you haven’t already, now’s the time to get your garden beds all tucked in for winter. Here’s our methods for winterizing your garden bed. If you follow these tips, your beds will be all ready for planting at the beginning of the spring and hopefully weed free.

Clean it up

If you’re like us, it’s easy for weeds to overtake a bed at the end of Summer/beginning of Fall. After your harvest comes in, you might be tempted to get a little lazy. If so, now’s the time to get out there and clean that thing out.

Removing weeds now will be a little easier, since cold weather in the northwestern hemisphere has killed a lot of them off. So get out there and clean those things out while they’re dormant. It’ll be a lot easier doing it now than in the Spring, when all those things come back to life and start taking over.

See Also: How To Kill Your Grass? Kill Unwanted Grass In Your Yard

Aerate your bed

Depending on who you ask, tilling may be the worst thing you can do to your soil, but adding a little air to the beds will be a big help. Not only will it loosen the soil, making it easier to plant in the spring, but it’ll help give oxygen and space to earthworms and those microbial little beasties that help with overall soil health. If you don’t want to till the soil, you can use a broadfork.

Test the soil

If you test your soil, you’ll have a heads up on what your garden beds need in order to flourish next season. A soil testing kit can be gotten from your local cooperative extension office (find it here). While you’re at it, you can test for nematodes and other pathogens in the soil. This will inform your fertilizer process and/or cover crop strategies (mustard is known to fight nematode populations).

Mulch it

Now you have your soil test in hand, it’s time to mulch your bed. A good mulching strategy does wonders for a garden bed. In addition to keeping weeds down, mulch can provide much needed nutrition to your soil. Use your soil test to determine what you need. There’s a lot of different types of mulch: Cover crops, wheat grass, pine straw, wood chips, bark, even plastic if you’re so inclined.

If your soil test indicates you need nitrogen, cover the bed with a combination of composted animal manure and woodchips. While the bed lies dormant in the winter, the mulch will keep that nitrogen in place for your plants to use. Even if your bed is in perfect health, nutrition wise, you may want to consider a cover crop of rye grass, which naturally prevents other weeds from growing in the bed. If you decide to go with plastic, be aware, the material has been shown to retard beneficial microbial and fungal growth in the soil.

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