The Marigold Potager – A Zone 3 Prairie Garden

Next year’s fantastic, healthy, organic, kitchen garden begins right here, right now. What you do now to winterise your beds, makes the difference between a great garden year ahead or a frustrating, pest filled one.

This is how organic gardeners put their gardens to bed in fall for healthy, happy beds that are ‘almost’ completely weed, disease, and pest free next spring.

1. Post Harvest Clean Up!

After you have harvested your summer veggies, canned and stored them to enjoy throughout the winter, it is garden clean up time.

This is the one most important thing you can do for a pest free garden next year.

Remove everything from the surface of your beds… spent tomato, squash and cucumber vines, all stems, leaves, seedlings and other plant debris lying around on top of the bed. Try to get all the leaf material and debris that you can, as they provide winter hiding spots for bugs and/or their eggs. Cabbage moths, stink bugs, aphids, leaf hoppers, crickets, grasshoppers, and so many more, may all be trying to overwinter their offspring in your garden.

Veggie beds should be well cleaned of all plant leaf like debris in order to not overwinter insects (good and bad) that come to life just as you are setting in your tender spring seedlings. If there is nowhere to hide, they will go elsewhere to hunker down for the winter months.

The only green material left standing should be your fall and winter veggies, like brussels sprouts that can be harvested straight out of a snowbank.

Compost the garden waste, layering browns and greens for faster cooking compost. You can safely compost powdery mildewed plant material as the fungal spores will not survive the composting process.

Zones 2, 3, 4 in Late October

Harvest the rest of your beets, rutabagas, carrots… anything that you left in the ground to sweeten up after a good frost or two and do a thorough garden clean up.

Brussel sprouts can stay in the ground for a while longer, they do just fine harvested out of a snowbank. Cut back asparagus to just a couple inches high.

Zone 7 – You will have more vegetables that you can leave in the garden after summer harvest. Carrots, beets, celery, celeriac, leeks, brussels sprouts, artichokes, kale, spinach, herbs can all be left in the garden to harvest throughout the winter. Harvest these veggies before mid March (they will go to seed, or get woody).

Clean the soils surface of all other leaves and green bits.

Spinach will go soggy after cold and rain, but leave in for the new shoots in late winter, pull out after it bolts.

2. Run A Hoe Through It & Weed Control!

Now is also the time to get rid of any weeds. Pull them by hand or knock them down with a hoe. I gently pull out all large and/or tap rooted weeds but knock down the wee ones.

My favourite tool for this is the Winged Weeder hoe as It lifts weeds out and does not disturb the soil, just skims right under the surface. It is similar to a triangle hoe. You can use any hoe that you prefer, you just do not want it to bite deeply into the soil as that brings new weed seeds to the surface.

If you are a companion planter, as I am, you will have lots and lots of volunteers popping up at this time of year. Calendula, nasturtiums, marigolds, borage, lemon balm, all kinds of wee little sprouts springing up everywhere. I remove them all as they tend to be overly prolific, and so that no pests are harboured in their leaves. More self sowing seedlings will sprout up again in spring.

Running a hoe through the top inch of soil not only upends weeds and weed seeds, but also bugs and their eggs. This is the time to find and dispose of grubs, cutworms, slug eggs.. pests that will eat your young seedlings.

3. Top Dress!

Top dressing is literally food for your soil! Feed your garden beds with 1 to 3 inches of compost or manure annually.

Do not use leaves, grass clippings, straw, or any other unfinished organic matter in the food garden beds in fall, just finished compost. If you really want to put leaves or straw in your food beds, is best to wait till you have had a good, hard frost so that insects have already hunkered down elsewhere for winter. If you live in a wet area of the country, using leaves and such provides homes for slugs, snails, earwigs, and sowbugs.

Topping your beds with compost/sea soil/manure annually will feed your soil, suppress weeds, make for great water penetration and retention, and keep beneficial micro-organisms thriving in your garden. You will never need to use fertilisers again. Truly.

Layer the manure on top of your soil, rake to smooth out, and walk away. Nutrients will be carried through your soil by the elements, the earthworms, and the beneficials that live in your soil. Do not dig in, do not turn your soil, and do not roto-till. Rototilling destroys soil structure, not to mention what it does to the earthworms, beneficial insects, microbes, and fungi threads. Eep!

Applying compost in autumn gives compost to microbial soil life to break down the compost for better soil friability and more nutrients for seedlings in spring. As the rains and snows fall on the garden beds, these nutrients are dispersed throughout the soil and to plants root zone by the soil life, ensuring that nutrients do not get washed away by winter weather. These nutrients are then readily accessed by plants in spring.

Investing in your soil, feeding it to make it rich, fertile, and friable, is the single best investment you can make towards a fantastic, healthy, productive kitchen garden. Compost is food for your soil!

That is it, really. your food growing beds are ready for old man winter.

I had someone ask me the other day if that is it, that is all one has to do? Thinking it cannot really be that easy, but I assure you that it is just that easy. Remove debris and top dress with finished organics. Walk away.

4. Mulch & Cover, if Needed!

If you have a cat visiting your beds, you may want to cover your clean beds with wire or mesh, or snow fencing, or expandable trellises from the dollar store.

Or, if you are covering your newly planted garlic with leaves or straw, use wire, trellises, or snow fencing to keep them in place.

I never mulched my garlic on the island, but is recommended here on the prairies. I would, however, mulch my dahlias if I was leaving them in the ground. Do not do this in colder areas. Zone 8 and above are really about the only zones that are safe for leaving dahlias in the ground.

5. Beneficial Insects

Now that you have removed all the leaves and bits of debris from your veggie garden, you may be wondering where the beneficial insects, like ladybugs, are supposed to over winter?

Easy answer … anywhere and everywhere, except in your food garden! You want to make your yard a wildlife haven so that the good guys are there, all around, thriving and more than happy to eat up the bad guys in spring, before they find your kitchen garden and attack your veggies.

Make the rest of your yard a paradise for birds, bees, frogs, snakes, spiders, bats, and all kinds of other beneficial insects and critters by creating a wildlife friendly habitat.

Leave your ornamental grasses and perennial flowers standing to offer seeds for birds and refuge for critters and insects. Some bees and good insects will over-winter in the hollow stems of your flowers.

Make brush piles, and wood piles, or raked leaf piles. Mulch around your trees, shrubs and perennials with wood chips, or bark, for them to live in. They (ladybugs) also love to live in your wood lot!

Make a bug house. They are super cute and fun to make with your kids.

You want your yard to be a year-round home for all small critters and insects, so provide places for them to hide, live, reproduce and be. You will have a fantastic, happy, healthy yard, and a super happy kitchen garden!

By keeping a clean food garden, the pests will not wake up in spring, in the food garden. By the time they wake up and find the new tender seedling, your beneficial insects will also be awake and ready to take them on.

This is one part of what we call integrated pest management in the greenhouse business, and is so easy to do.

Happy Garden Clean Up ~ Tanja