Just like your financial garden, your backyard garden can benefit from a little seasonal pruning and protection. To help you out, we’ve compiled our to do (and don’t) list:
1. Plant trees, shrubs, perennials and spring bulbs, giving them a great head start for spring!
2. Deadhead but don’t prune to remove spent blossoms from your roses and perennials.
3. Give your roses and blooming plants a rest from fertilizing, although keep feeding annuals.
4. Get a soil test so you can do some amending before the next growing season, if required.
5. If you have mature stands of early-blooming perennials, you can divide them so they can settle before winter.
6. Go through your beds and carefully snip, bag and discard any diseased foliage.
7. Leave much of your healthy garden intact: especially if you have plants with seedheads that will provide winter food for birds.
8. Try not to scrub the garden clear of brush piles or dead groundcover. Beneficial insects depend on that habitat for their winter survival.
9. All those fallen leaves are nutrients your garden needs next year. Run them over with the lawn mower and rake into your flower beds.
