Putting your garden to bed

Fall is here and winter is fast approaching. If you haven't had a killing frost it is only weeks away.

What should we do to get our gardens ready for winter so that when spring comes it will be ready to plant and produce a great summer bonanza?

The first task is to clean off your garden. The experts say to take what is left of your tomato plants and either burn them or get rid of them and not compost them. If your garden was overrun with weeds and grass, clean it off as good as you can. You may need to simply mow it off using your lawn mower. But as you mow blow as much of the cuttings off your garden as you can. Get it as clean as you can. What you want to do is get as much of the weed and grass seed off the garden. If the garden has some weeds and grass, my favorite way is to spend a little time using my Rogue Hoe and hoe as much as you can cleaning it down to the soil. A clean garden spot is simply satisfying to me.

Once your garden is as clean as you can get it, you have several options. My favorite way is to till it down a couple inches and plant a cover crop like turnips or spinach or kale or even radishes.

Part of my garden I planted using a mixture of these seeds. It produces a carpet of green that I can till under in the spring. If you get your garden tilled and seed planted by the middle of August. You can be picking goodies later in the fall.

With this being the end of October there isn't enough time to get seeds to sprout and grow before killing frosts happen.

As your leaves fall mulch them up, if you can, and scatter them over your garden. They will begin to decompose over the winter. And you can till them in next spring. You can use yard trimmings as long as you haven't sprayed or treated your yard with something like Weed and Feed or other weed killers.

If you know a farmer with horses or cattle or chickens or rabbits, get some manure and scatter it over your garden. Be sure to ask the farmer if he has sprayed his fields where the cattle are grazing with weed killers. These weed killers can be picked up by the cattle as they graze, be present in the manure and end up on your garden.

You can also buy some straw bales and scatter the straw over your garden. I wouldn't put over a couple inches of straw. In the spring you can till the straw or grass trimmings or mulched up leaves or manure into your garden.

The key is to try to not allow weeds or grass to not produce seed and reseed your garden. Next summer use more mulches and weed barriers. Invest in a good hoe like the Rogue Hoe. It will make putting your garden to bed next fall a simple and enjoyable task.