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| Fall is a great time to dig divide perennials and plant trees. |
With fall coming soon, it's a wonderful time to prepare your garden for the cooler weather and the growing season beyond. Use these fall garden maintenance tips to clean your garden, prepare it for spring growth, and make your plants and your lawn healthy.
Flower Bed Maintenance
Summer flowering plants are nearly over as temperatures fall. Remove annuals from your garden beds and overhaul your flower beds with a pop of autumn color in early fall. Hardy flowers and shrubs add visual interest to a yard through fall and early winter. Flowers and shrubs that have vivid autumn color include chrysanthemums, ornamental kales and cabbages, hardy aster, viburnum, chokeberry, and sumac.
Fall is an ideal time to dig up and divide perennial plants, such as peonies, iris, or hosta. Dig up your perennials when they have grown too large for their existing space. Using a garden spade, break apart the plant's root ball into several smaller pieces. Then plant each of the smaller plant pieces in the garden. Next year, you'll have several new plants that will grow in strong.
If you grow summer bulbs in your garden, fall is also the time to dig these bulbs up for storage over the winter. Summer bulbs include canna, gladiolas, or caladium. In the spring, once the danger of frost has passed, you can replant these bulbs for exotic summer color.
Fall is also the perfect time to plant new trees in your yard. During autumn, the leaves and shoots of trees stop growing. At the same time, their root systems continue to grow and thrive underground. This can help fall-planted trees to adapt to their new environment and begin to thrive before the winter comes on. In spring, fall-planted trees will thrive.
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| Fertilize your lawn in the fall to help it survive the winter and thrive next year. |
Lawn Care
Fall is a wonderful time to fertilize and treat your lawn so that it survives winter and thrives next year. Throughout fall, continue to mow and water your lawn until the ground freezes. This can help your grass to better resist diseases.
Fertilize your lawn in mid-autumn using a phosphorous-free fertilizer, so that your lawn grows in lush and full in the spring.
As part of your fall garden cleanup, also weed the lawn, garden beds, and borders. Throughout fall, rake your lawn to remove fallen leaves. Raked leaves can be composted, used as mulch, or put out as municipal yard waste.
Once the ground freezes, you can mulch over your garden beds to offer protection to sensitive plants that need it. Add 2-3 inches of mulch over garden beds and around tree roots to protect the plants underneath from the cold winter ahead.
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