More folks than ever have been gardening this past summer and what they may not realize is that now that fall is upon us and gardens are not necessarily looking as colourful in months previous, there are lots of things that we can do that we will thank ourselves for next spring.

Tammy Richot and Susan Jensen Stubbe from Jensen Nursery and Garden Centre give some great tips:

1. Take out any plants that had issues this year

Clean up to start the spring fresh. If you had any diseased plants, suffered from fungus or pest infestation dispose of them so they are not hanging around in your garden all winter.

2. Move any plants that need to be moved

“This is an awesome time to dig up perennials, move them, divide them, transplant them,” Richot and Jensen-Stubbe say. Especially if you noticed that there were plants that were not in the correct place or you feel like you made mistakes in your garden this year.

3. Improve your soil with Compost!

Composting can mean adding compost that you have been working on with food scraps all year or even just collecting leaves from your yard and putting those onto your flower beds. You’ll have better results if you can chew them up with the lawnmower first, but at the very least, get them in there and turn them into the soil to decompose over the winter.

If you’ve been struggling with hard soil, you can also add Clay Buster or Turkey Trot to improve the organic compounds in the soil for next year. Both products that you can find at Jensen Nursery and Garden Centre. 

4. Plant perennials, trees, and shrubs

The fall is a fantastic time to plant so long as the soil remains above 3 degrees in temperature. The ground will stay this temperature even longer than the air does so here in Winnipeg we have about another month in this planting window.

When you are planting trees and shrubs you’ll want to dig a hole larger than the pot you are transplanting and add fresh new soil to the hole. You can also add fungi that will attach to the roots and start to grow and help to establish them in their new home.

If you are planting trees and shrubs now, don’t put away your hose! Keep up the “weekly deep watering” right up to the freeze-up which will be late-October/early-November.

5. Bring in your vegetables now

Once we start to get frost at night your tomatoes will stop growing so there is no harm at all in bringing in your green fruit to ripen inside instead. The alternative is tucking them in at night but since they will not grow anymore you can save yourself the step.

6. Protect your trees from wildlife

 If you are spraying your trees or putting up a physical barrier to keep rabbits and deers away make sure you account for how high up the animals might reach when they are standing on a significant amount of snow, something we don’t want to think about but we know is coming.