Cleaning up the Garden for Winter

Now that we’ve had a few frosts most things in the garden are dead and it’s time to call it wrap on the growing season. Before it gets too cold, we need to clean up the garden and get it all tucked in for winter. We had a beautiful warm fall day, so decided to take advantage and get as much done as we could.

To eliminate any pests overwintering in the garden we cut out the dead plant material and move it to the compost bins. In the section of garden that will be tilled next spring, we pulled up the weed mat, set aside the sandbags and row cover, drained the hoses and dug up the gladiola corms and dahlia tubers. Those two flowers can’t handle the Vermont winters so each fall we dig them up and store them in the basement until the next season.

Saving Gladiola Corms and Dahlia Tubers

Saving these bulbs is also a fun way to save “seed” and expand the flower garden for next year. Many of the glads we planted made an additional corm or two. We have way more than we need at this point, so we’ll be able to give some away to family and friends next spring.

After a hard frost kills the plants, they can be dug. For Dahlias, we usually wait a week or (even better) two after the Dahlias die before digging to let them go fully dormant.

On the day we dig, we use a fork to gently lift them out of the ground being careful not to pierce or break any tubers (if you do, it’s fine; just snap it off and throw it away so it doesn’t rot in storage).

I then cut the stem off, leaving an inch or two, and store them unwashed in crates or cardboard boxes in the basement. I let them sit in the greenhouse or on the porch for a day or two to dry and let any bugs that may be on them scurry away.

Many people cut their stems long before harvesting, but I think leaving the stem gives you better leverage when harvesting, allows you to see exactly where the plant is (helpful in a big garden), and keeps water out of the hollow stem preventing rot.

For gladiolas, the process is similar. If the soil is soft enough, they can just be gently tugged out of the ground, or a fork can be used to lift them. We let them dry outside in a sheltered area for a couple days so that any excess dirt falls off and the leaves turn brown (they are usually still green even after a couple of hard frosts).

After the leaves turn brown, we cut the leaves off and store them in an open crate or a cardboard box in our cold storage room or a cool basement.

There are lots of different ways to store bulbs; but I think you don’t necessarily need to overthink it. I’ve had good success with the simplest methods, and some of my worst failures have been trying more complicated methods (using things like peat or perlite) to store them.

Using Weed Mat In the Garden

Why do we use weed mat? There are a few different benefits, but the main one would be that Andy doesn’t have to weed as much, something he hates to do (something you’ll hear often from Andy in the summer: “I HATE WEEDING!”).

Benefits of Using Weed Mat:

No weeds! BIG time savings - How does not pulling weeds in the middle of the hot summer sound? Weeding is wasted time that could be spent doing something more productive, rewarding and fun.
Holds moisture - Requiring less watering or reduces the need for rain events.
Reduces erosion - The soil is not exposed to heavy rains, minimizing runoff

Downsides of Using Weed Mat:

We used weed mat with holes burned at predetermined spacing in much of the garden to save on weeding. Now we can take it up in the fall and reuse it again next year.

It’s terrible to plant into - The pre- burnt holes are small, and sharp (I don’t know why nobody ever mentions this when talking about weed mat-it’s a huge downside for us).
It’s less versatile- you can’t necessarily just rip out a few plants and plant something else in their place. The entire row is committed to being covered at that set spacing. So you have to rip up the entire bed, or at least one whole end. It makes succession planting more difficult.
Spacing is all the same- With weed mat, you’re committed to however you burned your holes. For us, that means an entire row will be at 12” spacing or 9” or whatever. This makes it difficult to fit things are have different requirements or to plant only a little bit of something.
Rodents love to live under it. It provides great habitat for pests of all kinds. Great for the moles, great for the dogs, not so great for our plants!
You have to pull it up at the end of the year- In order to till, fertilize, chase out rodents and do whatever else you need to do, the weed mat needs to be pulled up and put back down. You also need new staples every time, which does cost some money.
Often leaves bits of plastic string behind in the dirt that get lost and never found. It is plastic, and breaks down over time with exposure to the elements. And while it photodegrades and breaks down into small pieces, that is not the same thing as biodegrading. That plastic that breaks down will still be in the environment for a very, very long time. Some weed mat is better than others (we had some that was fuzzy on one side-it was a nightmare and not what we thought we were buying).

Making Fall Cleanup Easier With a Hedge Trimmer

This year to make fall cleanup easier, we tried a new tool: a hedge trimmer. See the YouTube video for more details, but this tool made cleanup so much faster and easier. We were able to clean up an entire 50 foot row in minutes.