Autumn Gardening

If you’re keen to develop your seasonal gardening skills and you want to maintain  a year-round garden, you’ll have two main activities to focus on in Autumn. The first activity is planting your cold-season plants such as shrubs, trees or hardy perennials and annuals. The second activity is that planning ahead for spring blooms by sinking in your fall bulbs.

Do remember that you may only have a short window of opportunity to do this as planting needs to take place before the ground hardens or becomes too waterlogged. 

It’s critical to prep your garden for Autumn, before you begin planting. An important step is to remove any signs of disease and pests. If any diseased plant matter is left in your garden, the diseases can recur in the spring and threaten your new bloom i  the spring and summer. 

Here are my top three tips on how to prep your garden for Autumn and start your autumn planting:

Clean and Nourish Soil: Start by digging through your beds and thoroughly removing all dead plant matter, leaves and weeds. Once all the debris has been removed, you can start to nourish and condition your soil for a healthy and abundant spring growth. You can use organix compost to feed microorganisms. Dig and rake the soil well, to allow for ample oxygenation.

Plant Bulbs ready for spring: This is the time of year to plant bulbs that will bloom in the spring, because the ground is still warm enough for roots to take hold before the frost hits. You will need to work backwards from the estimated frost date as Bulb roots need six weeks to take hold. Once you’ve prepared your soil,  you will need to space your bulbs three to six inches apart and sink them in a partial to full-sun location. 

Choose Colorful Cold Season. There’s a huge variety of plenty of cold season perennials or annuals that offer continual colour and bloom well into Autumn.  So that your garden can be interesting during the colder months you can fill in landscaping gaps with a mixture of perennials, shrubs and trees that produce colorful winter berries.

You can simply focus on maintenance, once you’ve finished your planting for Spring. As the season changes and moves towards with frost-covered mornings, plants prepare to go dormant ahead of winter. During Autumn and Winter,  here’s still lots of activity happening within the soil. It’s this activity that you want to promote, as it encourages healthy growth in the spring, which is what winter gardening is all about.