By Anthony Reardon

With autumn on the not-so-distant horizon, many who don’t wish to carry their vegetable garden through the fall may be looking for recommendations on how to prepare it for winter, settling the garden for the season.

Luckily, fall is an excellent time for doing just this, and it can quickly be done following a handful of simple tips.

Clean, clean, clean

In the fall, vegetable gardens are fresh from a growing season’s disease development and insect infestations and may teem with undesirable life forms. It is essential to be diligent in cleaning when removing spent plants from the garden. This means removing the plant, any dropped leaves and remnant parts. Insects utilize these remnants as places to hibernate through the winter. Removing their haven will either cause them to leave the garden or succumb to the elements.

Prepare your soil for next year

At the end of the growing season, your garden’s soil has seen its nutrients actively utilized and depleted for several months. With plants cleaned out and the ground fallow, now is the optimal recommended time to replenish those nutrients with fertilizer incorporation, as the winter months will give the fertilizer just enough time to work its way through the soil before the next growing season.

If you have not recently conducted a soil test, the Extension Office offers support with that process, which includes recommendations for the exact fertilizer amendments you should make for the type of plants you intend to grow.

Protect your perennials

For those working with fruits or perennial vegetables like asparagus or rhubarb, this is also the time to ensure they will be “comfortable” throughout the winter. Trunks of smooth-barked fruit trees should be wrapped with aerated tree wrap to protect them from sunscald. Likewise, tree guards should be implemented to protect their bases from any wildlife looking for a winter snack.

For perennial vegetables, allow them to persist in the garden until the tops die back from the first freeze. After this point, they can be cut back a few inches above the ground and lightly mulched (2 inches or less) to help protect them through winter.

Preserve your equipment

Just as wildlife may opt to eat your trees for a winter snack, they may then look toward the water in your brittle, frozen, irrigation tubing to wash it down. For this reason, pulling up any non-stationary irrigation setups or hoses and placing them somewhere protected from the elements through the winter months is recommended.

This is also an excellent time to go through your garden tools and thoroughly clean them of soil or plant debris with a wire or horsehair brush. Applying a light layer of linseed oil to the metal of these tools afterward will assist in further preserving them. Consider placing supplemental feeders or water dishes far from your garden to help wildlife.

Take extra steps if you need to

Several other, less essential, steps can also be implemented in a vegetable garden as you prepare it for winter.

If a pest infestation has been nasty, and its progeny are known to survive in the soil, you can try eradicating the pests through solarization. You cover the beds with a black plastic tarp and essentially allow the soil to “cook” in the sun’s heat throughout the winter, sterilizing it.

If wanting to avoid having fallow soil for the entirety of winter, this is also an excellent time to investigate various cover crops that can be sown now to assist the soil later. However, cover crops require persistent maintenance, lest they be allowed to take over a bed.

These steps followed; you’ll be set for an even more productive growing season in 2025. My, how time flies!

Anthony Reardon is the horticulture small farms agent at the Johnson County K-State Extension Office.