WINTERIZE YOUR GARDEN

As you make sure your car is ready for winter this time of year, so should you make sure your garden is ready.

How? Commence by cleaning the dust in outside the house, removing dead foliage as well as the pegs and row markers. Reduce dead growth on your perennials.

These are all measures that not only get your garden and flower beds ready for planting and new development next spring, nonetheless they prevent overwintering pests and diseases on rotting foliage. Get sure to get rid of or burn any diseased plants. Don't put it in the compost pile.

Have you raked those fallen leaves yet? The grass is still green underneath and can use all the light possible to make for winter. Removing leaves also allows water and air to get to the living plants, protecting against them from suffocating. Pertaining to this reason, leaves, especially tough ones that bunch down and rot gradually, tend not to good mulch for perennials and should be raked off perennial beds.

It's inside its final stages to divide perennials, but there's still time to mulch shrubs, trees, and perennial beds with a loose organic and natural material such as bark mulch. Carry out it now, and you should have one less job to consider in the springtime. Mulches also help protect roots during winter from cold and fluctuating temperature ranges.

Don't mulch too thickly--no more than a few inches--around woody trees and shrubs as the mulch makes a nice label mice which chew start barking. If packed around shrub trunks too thick, mulch can smother the shrub and cause it to die.

Have you ever protected your evergreens from drying winter winds? In colder weather the roots of evergreens are frozen and not able to take up drinking water. Winter winds may desiccate or dry them away, eventually triggering those to expire. This is why leaves turn brown--from lack of water.

Protect your evergreens by adding a display screen on the windy factors, usually the north and west. This is often as simple as erecting three solid wood stakes and wrapping burlap around them. But whatever you do, don't cover the plants directly with plastic. It will heating up like a garden greenhouse on sunny days and cook your plants.

Or perhaps you can spray evergreens with an antidessicant, available from your local garden middle. This provides a protecting layer on the leaves that will wear off by spring. Some years this may work or not, depending on specific conditions and climate that year. Research results are mixed on whether or not antidessicants are effective.