Seasonal Maintenance

“Nature bestows her own, richest gifts
And, with lavish hands, she works in shifts…”
~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham

Winter

Winter is the season of rest and root growth in the garden. Your plants are focusing their energy on growing deeper and stronger roots and not doing much up top.

Most of winter has very little for the gardener to do outside unless you live in zone 9 or above.

♣ Inside, winter is the season of planning.  This is the time of year when you want to work on your garden blueprint and templates, or decide which plants you want to remove, or start your shopping list for spring and summer plants and flowers.

♣ Toward the end of winter comes the time for starting seeds.  Depending on your climate and what you want to grow, the seeds may be sown indoors in trays, or direct sown outside in/on the soil.

Many vegetables like to start growing outside well before the last frost date, such as cabbage (but be prepared with frost cloth, just in case)

♣ As for flowers (both perennial and annual), many are easy to grow from seed and can be started indoors about 1 to 2 months before the last frost date for your hardiness zone, then transplanted outdoors as soon as the weather is warm enough.

♣ Spring blooming shrubs that bloom on new wood should also be pruned in late winter, just before spring

Spring

A gardener spends all winter waiting for spring…and once it’s here, we burst outside and start a long list of garden chores.

♣ Task #1 is cleanup – remove all the dead plant matter that sat over the winter.  Put it in the compost pile, cutting up large pieces to aid in decomposition.

♣ Sow seeds, either indoors or out.

♣ Plant new plants, from the nursery or the seeds you started indoors.

♣ Fertilize, especially flowering shrubs like roses, azaleas, and hydrangeas.

♣ Add compost and/or fresh mulch to the top of beds.

♣ Prune shrubs and trees that bloom on new wood (do this in early spring).

♣ Water as necessary.

♣ Get ahead of weeds (mulching, hand pulling new weeds, etc.).

Summer

Ah, the season of abundance.

The vast majority of perennials and annuals bloom throughout the summer months.

♣ Continue planting new plants and transplanting spring-sown seedlings.  Add organic fertilizer at planting time.

♣ Snipping and Clipping – snip off the growing tips of new plants to encourage multiple branches to grow (and thereby increasing the number of blooming tips).

♣ Keep fruit and veggie plants/shrubs/trees watered and fertilized.  Harvest fruits & veggies as soon as they’re ready.

♣ Fertilize the whole garden once at the beginning of summer, then not again until fall.

♣ Water as necessary, keeping in mind that hotter temperatures mean plants use more water than they did in cooler temps.

♣ Weed regularly, at least once a week to keep on top of them.

♣ Pests–  If your garden is new, the pest count may be high, but if you leave the pests for now (just walk away and try to ignore them), the predators (assassin bugs, ladybugs, lizards, wasps, frogs, etc) will find them this year and into the next spring, and next year your predator to pest ratio will be much better and you’ll have a lot less pests.  Trust me, I speak from hard-learned experience!  Nature knows what she’s doing and balance happens!

Fall

Fall is very different depending on what part of the world you’re in and what temperatures you experience.

Here in southeast Texas, fall is basically just the latter part of summer– still warm and everything still blooming.  Other places have cooler temperatures and fall blooming perennials and berry-bearing shrubs.  And in many northern locales, fall swiftly brings biting temperatures and the end of blooms.

Wherever you are, however, once the weather cools enough to bring the first frost, there are just a couple of things to do to prepare your garden for winter.

♣ If you have a late frost date (or none at all), fertilize the garden again in September

♣ When veggie plants are spent and no longer producing, go ahead and pull them out and add to the compost pile

♣  Rake dead leaves off grass, walkways, patios, and driveways, and add the leaves to the compost pile. If possible, put them through a shredder to improve decomposition.

Leave dead leaves that have fallen on plant beds – don’t remove them.  This leaf mulch is needed for overwintering pollinators, reptiles, and worms, as well as to provide winter insulation for plant roots.

♣ Prune shrubs if applicable to the type (research to make sure)

♣ Slow down watering, as cooler temps mean lower water needs

♣  If you have tender plants that you want to protect from freezing, cover or wrap them as necessary before the first frost arrives