3 Ways to Prepare your Garden for Winter

Prepare your garden for winter.  While the winter can be harsh on your garden, there are ways you can prepare for, and hopefully prevent, some of the potential damage.

The combination of freezing temperatures and wintry precipitation certainly provides challenges for garden management, but here are 3 helpful tips to help your garden survive the winter, and thrive in the spring.

#1. Remove Your Rotting Plants

Those old, rotting plants in your garden can cause a myriad of issues. They often are breeding grounds for disease, plant-eating-pests, and fungus, which are all things that can survive the winter and continue to wreak havoc in your garden.

While it’s impossible to keep these things out of your garden all together, taking the time to remove dead and rotting plants before winter fully hits is a great way to limit the damage.

Be sure to fully remove the root of any dead or rotting plant. If you don’t fully remove the root, it’s practically the same as not removing the root at all.

Roses are one of the more popular features you’ll find in a garden. And while they certainly can survive the cold weather, it’s up to the gardener to properly prepare them for winter.

The first and most important thing a gardener can do is give their roses plenty of water before the ground freezes.

Next, it’s a good idea to pile up soil around the root of the rose, to protect it from ice and frost.

Finally, some gardeners elect to cover their roses with a styrofoam cone. While this can be a great way to preserve the flowers, it’s crucial it gets done correctly. Check out this article from the University of Illinois on how to properly cover your roses with styrofoam.

Surrounding your garden with wire-mesh screening is a great way to keep animals out. While many of the animals you typically worry about chewing at your garden will be hibernating, there are still some critters out there who will do damage in the winter time.

Wire-mesh screening, also known as hardware cloth, can be found at all the major hardware stores, and also at online retailers like Amazon.

Winter can be an ominous time for a garden, but with a little preparation, your flowers should be able to survive the winter, and thrive in spring!

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