Autumn is probably the best time for you to prepare your garden for the arrival of the harsh winter season. In fact, your preparations during this period can significantly affect your garden’s situation once spring arrives. However, you might miss out on many essential tasks that you could have done quickly without a clear plan. Hence, we’ve made this article to give you a checklist of some of the standard garden works you should do during the autumn season to keep your garden alive and vibrant.
Some of the best things you can do for your garden in the fall (autumn) is to remove leaves from the garden bed, do some planting (including tulips), trimming and pruning and to help your lawn out a little bit by mowing it!
1. Removing leaves
As sunlight starts to become some sort of a luxury for your plants during autumn, their leaves will soon lose their job of converting sunlight to food. Once they’re no longer needed, they would just fall off and turn into a potential disaster if not taken care of. Hence, you need to clean them up before they can negatively affect your garden.
One reason for this is that these leaves, especially those large ones, can cover up your lawn or some of your small plants. Once your plants get covered by these leaves, the limited sunlight they could get could become even more scarce, or they could not even get anything at all. What’s more, the areas covered by these leaves will become an ideal environment for moss growth, which would compete with your plants for soil nutrients.
To avoid these, you simply need to clean up the leaves regularly. These leaves are also quite useful if you turn them into mulch. You can then use the mulch to improve your soil’s quality or simply stock it up for later.
2. Transplanting and planting
Transferring your plants during autumn is a good idea. This is because of the occasional rain showers that keep the soil moist at the ideal level. Since summer just ended not so long ago, the ground should still be warm and cozy enough for the newly transplanted plants. This ensures that the stress they are going through can be minimized, preventing transplant shock.
Suppose you’re interested in adding varieties to your garden. In that case, you can also plant some salad greens such as lettuce or spinach. Autumn is also the best time to grow vegetables such as turnips, broccoli, or Brussels sprouts. For flowering plants, a wide variety of perennials such as lilacs could withstand the cold winter months.
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3. Trimming and pruning
The autumn season is also the best time to trim or prune your plants, especially if you have hedges. For hedges, trimming or pruning can promote the growth of new buds, making it appear more bushy and fuller, increasing its visual appeal. However, this does not mean that you can simply do this for every plant in your garden. In fact, if you prune some species of flowering plants such as wisteria, you can prevent them from blossoming.
4. Mowing the lawn
As stated earlier, the amount of sunlight during autumn will dwindle down so much that it would hard for some plants to survive. Even your lawn is not exempted. If you do not take care of it this time, you will notice many brown patches and moss formations.
To prevent this, simply remove any leaves you can find in your lawn and mow it for the last time around November. Ensure you do not cut it too short since the shorter the grass is, the lesser sunlight it could get.
