Key Points
Use mulch, leaves, or compost in the fall to insulate soil and boost nutrients.Add biochar or sulfur for soil health, and clear weeds before winter.Plant cover crops before frost to enrich soil and block spring weeds.
After a successful spring and summer garden, you might be eager to start planning what you’ll grow next season. But you don’t have to wait for winter to pass to get your garden ready for spring. Turns out, there are several things you can add to your garden in the fall to gear up for next spring’s blooms.
Here are seven things expert gardeners say you should add to your garden in fall to make next spring’s blooms better.
Meet the Expert
Carly Conley is the general manager of Valley Hills Nursery in California.
Caroline Ervin is a landscape designer at Caroline Ervin Landscape Design.
Mulch
As you wait for next spring to roll around, laying down mulch in the fall will greatly help preserve the moisture of your garden so you won’t have to tend to it once the warmer weather comes back.
“Mulching garden beds in fall with 2-3” of natural mulch will help block weeds, maintain moisture, insulate the soil, and add organic matter for a healthier garden in the spring,” says Caroline Ervin, landscape designer at Caroline Ervin Landscape Design.
She adds that the best type of mulch to use is one that is shredded and natural (no dyes, please).
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Leaves
Don’t want to pay the cost of mulch? Turns out, leaves make an excellent free and natural substitute that you don’t need to rake up.
“During the fall, fallen leaves serve as a natural soil conditioner, enriching the soil with nutrients and organic matter,” says Carly Conley, general manager of Valley Hills Nursery. “By mimicking the natural cycle of a forest floor, leaves protect, feed, and improve your garden’s soil over the winter.”
To use leaves to prep your garden for next season’s blooms, Conley says shred oak leaves by running the lawn mower over them to speed up the decomposition process as they cover your garden floor and to add a 2-inch layer of the shredded leaves around plants to insulate them, suppress weeds, enrich the soil, and more.
Compost
Your garden’s soil faces the challenge of losing its nutrients during the fall and winter. Compost helps the soil maintain its nutrients that can become lost in the cooler months, and the best part is that you can create your own compost pile from kitchen scraps and things from your yard.
Biochar
Have you noticed that the biggest factor to worry about for fall garden prep is your soil? Like compost, Conley says biochar can be extremely beneficial to add to your garden in the fall for better blooms next year—its extremely porous, charcoal-like structure retains water and nutrients, providing a habitat for beneficial soil microbes, and improving soil structure
Weed Killer
As you tend to your soil to keep it healthy for next season, don’t forget to remove weeds with weed killer while you’re at it.
“Weeds can take important nutrients from the soil that the plants need to bloom and grow,” Ervin says. “Not removing weeds can cause them to seed and create more weeds next year.”
The best time to remove weeds? According to Ervin, it’s always easier to weed a planting bed after a rain when the soil is moist than trying to wrangle out weeds by hand from hard, dry soil.
Crop Cover
Cop covers are another fall garden essential to prepare your garden for spring. Not only do they help prevent soil erosion and add more organic matter to enhance the soil’s structure, but they also help suppress weeds from growing.
Conley says to sow your cover crops about four to six weeks before your first frost to allow for strong establishment, and then cut down the cover crop before it produces seeds to prevent it from becoming a weed in the spring.
Sulfur
If you’ve tested your garden’s soil and discovered that it’s high in alkalinity, then adding sulfur to your fall garden can be a big help for the spring.
Sulfur in the garden helps to lower the pH level to give more nutrients to your plants while helping your plants become resistant to droughts and cold, making it perfect for winter-growing plants you are blooming.
“This treatment is only necessary for gardens with alkaline soil (pH greater than 7) and plants that require acidic conditions,” Conley says. “You can apply sulfur and then top dress with mulch to enhance the heat needed for the microbes to get to work.”
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