Goodnight Garden

It's time to think about the cold season and getting the garden ready.

- ZACH LOEKS

You can find many reasons to put your vegetable garden to sleep for the winter. Remember that a natural ecosystem will necessarily have preparation to go into the long cold winters that we experience throughout most of North America.

There are many important ways that we can maximize ecosystem services when putting our garden to rest. These can be broken down into various strategies and can also paired with other typical market garden and landscape management techniques.

Let’s explore some of the top choices for preparing your garden for winter.

COVER CROPPING

Cover cropping is your ally going into the winter because it protects the soil surface not only in the fall when you may have heavy rains, but also throughout the winter. Cover crops can keep soil life buffered from the extreme temperatures of the cold winter months.

It also protects the soil in the spring, when there is not only a lot of runoff from snow melt but also heavy rains, which will erode unprotected soil, causing you to lose not only the grains of your soil but also the nutrients.

Cover cropping has additional benefits, too, scavenging nutrients in the fall. This means these crops take up various soluble nutrients, such as nitrogen available in the soil after your crop is finished, and holds them in an insoluble form in the form of organic matter that is living and growing.

Cover crops can also provide weed suppression benefits by preventing the germination of weeds by covering them over with a canopy — especially perennial weeds that may germinate in the fall and annual weeds that may germinate in the spring. This last benefit is best achieved by using an overwintered cover crop such as winter rye, which has the added effect of suppressing weed seed germination by an allele pathic chemical reaction in the soil.