Introduction
Most people leave their garden to its own fate during the winter months. However, there’s so much more you can do. With proper planning, you can keep your garden green even in the snowy months and make it look great for the spring season. However, it involves a bit of hard work, and to save yourself some time and effort, you can hire professionals by searching for “landscape companies near me”. Let’s check out how you can get your garden ready for winter:
The Preparation
- Clean up the paths and paving – You know cleaning wet things is a pain and it’s just better to blow away or vacuum dry dirt. The same holds for your garden. During late fall, it’s easier to clean things up when the leaves are dry and crisp, and the garden has dry dirt instead of mud. After you clean the debris off your paths and pavings, consider giving them a thorough cleanup with good old detergent water and a brush with stiff bristles. Doing this will make those surfaces less slippery during the winter months. The job is easier and more efficient if you have a pressure washer.
- Take care of the boundaries – The fall season is the best time to take care of the borders in your garden. You can start by removing dead leaves, weeds, and foliage from the borders of your lawn and also cut down perennials that are closer to the edge of the border. Look through the garden and check for perennial stems with good seed heads. Once you identify them, you can clear the rest and clip the lawn edges. These large seed heads look amazing with the winter frost on them. You can also cut down deciduous grass and keep them on the ground to protect other plants. You can also redesign your borders with an iron edge. Try to avoid the inefficient narrow strips when you do so.
- Pruning – Structural shrubs can grow a lot over the year and this is the perfect time to p[rune them back into shape. It’s also a great time to trim your hedges before the cold season hits. Check the trees and remove damaged, diseased, or crossing branches so that the stems don’t rub against each other and cause flaking or wounds. You can also zest up the frosty season with some color in your garden. Add trees and shrubs with radiant colors and patterns that can last through a couple or more months of frost. You can plant striped snake bark maples, Tibetan cherry, chalk-white paper birch, and more. To add a visual element of heat to the garden, you can add scarlet or flame-orange shrubby dogwoods.
- Protect the plants – Before winter hits, you need to protect your delicate plants. If you have cannas, palms, or agapanthus in pots, you should shift them inside a greenhouse. Otherwise, you can protect them with horticultural fleece and add a thick layer of mulch around the base. This helps to keep the soil from freezing when the temperature drops and also provides sufficient warmth to the plants. If you have small deciduous trees, you can even dig them out along with the roots and replant them inside a conservatory or other such structures. For other plants, especially evergreens you need root balling.
- Fix garden structures – When you have pruned trees, trimmed shrubs, and taken care of the borders, you have the perfect setup for repairing your garden structures. Pruning and clearing provide you easy access to many structures like the greenhouse, summerhouse, and even your fencing. So, it’s easy to pick out dead and decaying timber, spot any out-of-place nails, and notice any signs of instability or damage. Fix them up so that you can protect your plants during winter and give them the right environment to grow during spring.
- Polish up water features – Ponds, fountains and other types of water features may get clogged due to falling dead leaves during the autumn season. An easy fix is to cover them with a net. It’s also a great time to deep clean those structures since animals are less active in late autumn season and you don’t have to worry about scaring away or hurting any wildlife in your garden. If you have fishes in the pond, consider installing smart pond thermometers or other such monitoring tools. This will notify you of dangerous temperature drops so that you can lay out protective measures quickly.
- Install outdoor lighting – As mentioned above, the dull and gloomy months of winter can be quite depressing. Yes, the first snowfall still invokes childhood joy, but after a few days it wears off and you’re left with cold and dark skies and a white lifeless garden. While you can add certain winter-hardy plants to amp up the appearance of your garden, you can go one step further and add outdoor lights. You can use those lights to highlight the sculptures, topiary, and trees. Spotlights can be installed wherever you want, and you can also adjust the color and patterns of the light to add vibrance and character to your garden.
- Snow-checking measures – Snowfall is wonderful when it’s limited to a certain extent. Make that heavy snowfall for a prolonged period and you can have shocking amounts of damage in your garden. That’s why you need to set up some protective measures for your small and weak plants. You can use glass enclosures with holes to protect weak plants or even make some tunnels with plastic water piping so that the snow can be redirected away from the plants.
Conclusion
Now that you know all the measures to take before winter, you should implement it before the first hits. It may seem like a lot of work, but you can always outsource the tough jobs to pros. Hiring them is as easy as searching for “landscape companies near me”.
