7 Essential Fall Gardening Tips for a Healthy, Sustainable Garden 🍂🌱

Hello everybody,

🍂 As autumn arrives and the air turns crisp, your garden is entering one of its most important seasons. In this video, I’m sharing 7 essential fall gardening tips that will not only prepare your garden for winter but also set it up for long-term success.

Discover sustainable gardening practices, eco-friendly soil care, and clever ways to make the most of falling leaves, cooler nights, and seasonal changes. Whether you’re new to gardening or a seasoned green thumb, these autumn garden do’s will help you build a healthier, more resilient garden year after year.

✨ If you enjoy this video, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share for more organic gardening, sustainable living, and seasonal tips. I’d love to hear how you’re preparing your garden for autumn in the comments below!

With love,
Anna

Hello and welcome to our cottage garden. For today’s video, I just wanted to hang out and share seven sustainable gardening practices that you can incorporate while you transition your garden from summer to fall. [Music] The leaves are already changing colors on the mountains, but welcome back. Fall is such a beautiful time of year here in Vermont. You know, the air is cooler and leaves are slowly starting to change and I think it’s just a perfect time to start thinking about sustainability. So again, today I’m going to be sharing seven sustainable gardening trends and tips for fall that not only will make your garden thrive, but also help the environment. So we’ll cover soil health, wildlife support, water conservation, and even how to turn your autumn leaves into gardening gold. So let’s jump right in. Number one is compost mulching. So this trend is pretty big right now, and for good reason. So instead of reaching for, you know, synthetic fertilizers, more gardeners are topping their soil with delicious garden compost. And here’s why. Compost can add those nutrients that you’re looking for. It also improves the soil texture and it keeps the moisture locked in. And it can also act like a cozy blanket for your garden during those colder months. It’ll protect the roots and the soil life. The best part of this practice is that you can make it at home from, you know, kitchen scraps, garden clippings, and this means less waste going to the landfill and more fertility staying in your yard. So, it’s a win-win. So, speaking of soil, let’s talk about leaf mold. Every fall, trees drop literally tons of leaves, and gardeners are starting to really see them as a resource, not as an inconvenience. Leaf mold is basically what it sounds like, decomposed leaves and it turns into this rich crumbly soil conditioner. So unlike compost, which is nutrient-rich, leaf mold improves the soil structure, it improves water retention, and it fosters the beneficial fungi that your plants are really going to need. But it doesn’t have a lot of those nutrients that fertilizer or compost is going to have. So, the best way to create leaf mold is to create a little area in your yard, in your garden, on your property. I like to call them our leaf mold bays where we just have several of them. We have three of them on the property. Because we live in a deciduous woodland, there’s so many leaves. And what we like to do is just rake our leaves into our leaf mold bays. And then once they’re all set up, the moisture from the winter from all of our snow and rainfall is going to help those leaves break down. And then usually around this time of year, around the autumn, is when our leaf mold from the previous year has perfectly matured. So leaf mold is really kind of the lazy guys guide to composting without the nutrition benefits, but it’s just a great way of using all of these leaves. just this wonderful natural resource that we have in order to improve the soil structure and create a lot of, you know, that wonderful layer of mulch. So, it’s just one of my favorite gardening practices. We do it in a very kind of more labor intensive way than we probably need to, but if you have a leaf blower or a smaller yard, just gathering those up is such a fantastic way of doing this. If you don’t have the resources right now to create a bay and build that maybe out of old pallets or wood, what you could do is put it in a a few large trash bags, poke some holes in those. Keep it nice and moist and leave that for several months and then just check it out. See how it is. It should never smell bad. Leaf mold, unlike compost, never goes through that process where it smells. So, that’s another benefit as well. Especially if you have a smaller yard, you’ll never have that that issue with throughout the process of composting. Has a little bit of a ripe smell to it. Not at the end, but in the middle. So, leaf mold never gets that. It always smells like delicious like earthy goodness. It’s like taking a beautiful hike in in the redwoods. It reminds me of leaf mold is just wonderful. So, another gardening practice to incorporate is native planting. So, this is a big trend. It has been for a long time. But planting these natives in fall is fantastic. This is a way of choosing plants that naturally grow in your region. You’re working with nature instead of against it. You know, native plants, we’ve talked about this before, they need less water. They need fewer chemicals and less maintenance overall. Plus, they provide essential food and shelter for pollinators and birds. So you could really think about adding a few native perennials this fall. They’ll really establish those strong roots over the winter and then they’ll explode with growth in the spring. So you’re not just planting flowers, you’re really building a mini ecosystem. And I think that native plants are really a part of a bigger picture of gardening. I don’t think you need to strictly plant natives. I think incorporating other things to help bring in lots of beneficials and lots of insects into your garden is great, but one of the best things about native plants is that you’re really helping a lot of the native insects, insects even that are specific to your local area, you’re helping those specific insects thrive. And there have been studies done about how certain native plantings have helped certain species of insect come back in certain areas. So it’s just part of a bigger gardening picture. The next practice to talk about is living fences. Now we have several fences here for several different reasons. But instead of putting up, you know, plastic fences or even wood, you know, treated wood fences, a lot of people are turning to hedges and shrubs or even sort of edible borders to create these natural boundaries. These living fences, they give you privacy. They act as wind breakers and also they absorb carbon dioxide. They’re also fantastic for sound. They can kind of mute sounds. So, if you live in a really noisy area, having that live fence can be really helpful. They also provide blooms for pollinators, berries, and a sanctuary for wildlife. Some even bring, you know, you can harvest for your own table or your fall decorations. And fall is the perfect time to plant these shrubs and these hedging plants so that they can establish their roots before the winter really kicks in. Next one is water-wise gardening. So with unpredictable weather, water-wise design is really more important than ever. This practice is all about efficiency. You know, think drip irrigation, rain barrels, mulching like we talked about, and kind of grouping plants together with similar water needs. Even swapping out thirsty plants for more drought tolerant ones can make a really big difference. So, not only will you save money and conserve water, but also your garden will be more resilient, you know, in the long run, and fall is a great time to set up these systems before the next growing season. So, you’ll kind of get ahead. And here on the mountain, we have a lot of rain, but we also are on a mountain, and so a lot of our slopes don’t retain any water at all, but then our borders will retain a lot of water. So, we try to be really specific about our plantings. Things that are a bit more drought drought tolerant, we put on the hillside or we put in an area that’s a bit more sloped. Our sedums, we’ve put them on the hill, we’ve put them in the back where it’s a little bit more sloped. And the sedums that were in the borders this year, they all got way too wet and they really struggled with powdery mildew. So, that was kind of a bust. But in future, I think we’ll see how it goes next spring. But we might end up swapping these out for things that actually like more water because we get so much rainfall here. But at this time of year when we’re sort of transitioning August and September, it can kind of dry down a bit. And so we’ve actually had to, you know, be handwatering some of our annuals specifically. and a few of our shrubs, the ivory hala dogwoods, were getting really thirsty underneath the trees because the trees were kind of sucking all the moisture that was left out of the soil. So, my husband set up a uh a soaker system and we got sent the the whole system um in our PO box. We mentioned this in a recent video, but we can leave it again. It was Eve and it’s been working really really well that system for us. So you can just use your cell phone to turn it on and off. And that is a really efficient way of kind of targeting those plants. Those are all specifically grouped together. So it’s really easy just to water those very quickly. And having it snake around their roots is a very efficient way of watering. The next one is one of my favorites. This is about building wildlife habitats. So, this is a trend which is really, really fantastic because you’re creating wildlife habitats for any of the nature that’s in your area. So, instead of tidying every corner of the garden, you’re going to leave some spaces a little wild. So, seed heads, leaf piles, log stacks, give shelter to insects, to frogs, to chipmunks throughout the winter. um you know, pollinator hotels and native hedros also support biodiversity year round. And this is a helpful thing to remember that a sustainable garden is one that really supports all life, not just our plants. And finally, we have cover crops, sometimes called green manurses. Instead of leaving soil bare over the winter, you can sew crops like clover, rye, or mustard. And these crops protect your soil from erosion. They add organic matter. And even in the case of some legumes, they fix nitrogen in the soil. So come spring, you simply cut them back and then let the nitro uh the nutrients feed your soil. It’s kind of like giving your garden a little winter jacket and a free meal. So that’s it. Those are my seven sustainable gardening trends and techniques that I’m going to be testing out this year. Let me know what kinds you’re going to be trying out, how your garden is doing, and what kind of practices you’re going to be implementing this fall. Please let me know if there are any other videos and video topics you’d like me to cover. I love talking all things gardening, so do let me know. Like this video if you like this kind of content. Subscribe if you’re not already. It’s just the two of us and you guys hanging out, and it really does help us out when you subscribe. And we will see you again very, very soon. Okay, bye. Happy gardening. [Music]