COCHRANE— Sept. 22 marked the first day of fall, and it’s time to start thinking about winterizing your garden.
Andrea Blonsky, chair of the Cochrane Community Gardens Society, said that properly winterizing your garden gives your perennials the best chance at successful winter hibernation and giving your new plants a leg up in the spring.
Blonsky is not a horticulturist by trade, but she has been gardening since she was five-years-old.
“I have gardened for many years, and I have made many mistakes, and I am prepared to share my gardening tips so that people don’t have to make the same mistakes that I did,” she said.
The first step is to winterizing your garden is clean up, and you can start by removing the growth that won’t return in the spring.
“For anything that is an annual ingrowth, so something that you plant one year and it’s done at the end of the growing season can come right out of the garden.”
Carrots and parsnips are biannual plants that will grow for two consecutive seasons, typically bigger in the second, and can be left in your garden.
“There used to be kind of a view that everything should be cleaned out of your garden completely. You trim your perennials right down to the ground to a few inch height, you raked every last leaf out of your garden and you kept it pristine through the winter months. That’s not the approach that’s followed these days.”
Blonsky noted that you should clean out any plants that might be diseased, but you can leave a layer of leaves on top of the soil in your garden.
A lot of beneficial insects, including ladybugs, spiders, millipedes and beetles will all live under that leaf cover through the winter months.
When the leaves deteriorate in the spring they produce snow mould, which is very beneficial to the soil in the garden.
“The leaf mould that is produced from that layer of leaves is a great soil conditioner and enhancer and can increase the water retention of your soil by up to 50 per cent. It’s an incredible, what we call, a soil amendment.”
The perennial plants can be a great visual enhancer for your garden through the winter months, Blonsky said, but in the case that they become unsightly, or begin to collapse, you can trim them down, being careful to leave a healthy amount of stem growth.
The stem growth provides the plant with a bit of habitat protection.
“By trimming them in a neat, higher pattern, you also have a bit of that visual interest in the garden through the winter months,” Blonsky said.
For shrubs and trees, Blonsky said, the fall is not the time to prune.
“You want to wait until the winter months,” she said. “You don’t want an open wound. Any time you cut a branch on a plant it’s got to heal itself. At this time of year, it’s just a little premature. When you prune in the late winter months just before the sap starts to flow, you’ve got minimal cellular activity in the plant at that stage and that’s a safe time to prune.”
Roses, she said, are the exception. Roses can tolerate fall pruning, and leaving them long through the winter could cause the stems to break under the weight of the snow cover.
Lilacs set themselves early for next spring’s blossom, Blonsky said. If you see a branch that’s split, cutting it off will stunt next year’s growth.
The next step after you’ve completed clean up is watering in your yard.
Cochrane is in a very arid geographic zone, and that can be very hard on wintering plants.
Evergreen trees, especially, benefit from being watered during the fall months.
“We also have the Chinook season. You would think that a mild winter would be easier on plants but it’s not,” she said. “It’s our freeze-thaw where we see big, big fluctuations with the temperatures with the Chinook winds that come in that can really harm our shrubs, our perennials and our trees.”
Springs that follow Chinook-heavy winters often see the most plant deaths, she said.
An early-season hard frost is another common thing that is very hard on plant life in this area.
There are several ways to extend your season. If you know the cold season is coming, you can throw a sheet or blanket over sensitive plants to protect them from frost, or quickly hose off the frost clinging to plants first thing in the morning following a freeze.
If you act quickly you might be able to buy yourself a few extra weeks of growth in your garden, Blonsky said.
Fall is also a great time to supplement your soil by topdressing with compost.
“Some of the product can be a very light, fluffy product, so you want to work it in a little bit because you don’t want it all blowing away with our winter winds,” Blonsky said.
The soil on which Cochrane sits contains a lot of clay, which is antithetic to plant growth. Because of that, it’s often easier to start with your own substrate rather than trying to improve the soil that is already in the ground.
“Instead of trying to incorporate compost and sand and different amendments into the soil, sometimes it’s easier to simply leave the naturally occurring soil below and doing mounded beds or raised boxes so that you’re not using that bad soil as a growing medium.”
If you are amending your naturally occurring soil, Blonsky said, remember to work the compost into the earth so you do not lose the beneficial amendment to Chinooks or winter winds.
A lot of backyard compost contains weed seeds that will sprout up in your garden if you add it come springtime. If you add your backyard compost early enough in the fall, when there are still enough sunny days for the seeds to germinate and sprout, the weeds will die in the harsh winter months.
The Cochrane Community Gardens Society’s mandate is to facilitate the creation of community garden spaces in Cochrane.
To get involved, or to find out more gardening tips like these you can follow the Cochrane Community Gardens Society on Facebook.
