How To Prevent Disease And Pests In Your Garden By Proper Fall Clean Up

Cleaning up the beds in the fall is an essential gardening task. By the time fall comes around, after all the harvesting and work of preserving the harvest from the garden, I am ready for a break. Take the time to properly clean up your beds because doing it now will save you time and work later. Here are some tips for the clean up to help you not spread disease and pests from year to year in your garden beds.

• It is a great idea to grind up greens and put them in your compost heap along with some ground up leaves. I would caution you however to NOT use plants with diseases in your compost heap. you do not want to spread those diseases in your garden next year. Take those sickly plants and put them straight in the trash.


• Do not leave anything laying  around the yard like pieces of wood and the like. If you do it provides a perfect over wintering spot for bugs like snails and squash bugs.


• If your tomato plants had any disease problems it is best to get them cleaned off very well with soapy water so as to not reintroduce the disease again the next year.


• Make sure you take care off all the weeds or at least take off the seed pods so that they do not spread the seeds all throughout the garden next year.


• Add a nice layer of compost or mulch to the garden beds. This will help add food for those worms to work on through the winter, keep the weed seeds from taking root as easily and make your beds nice and ready for plants in the spring.

Happy Gardening!

Related articles

• Fall Garden Tips (myblindrepair.com)


• Putting The Garden To Bed (thehomekeepersheart.wordpress.com)


• 5 fall gardening activities (ksl.com)

How Leaves Can Improve Your Garden

Leaves are in abundance in most areas right now. They are a great free resource to improve your garden, so why not take advantage of it?

Happy Gardening!

How to Make Perfect Compost

Compost is such a great way to save money and make your garden very healthy. If you have tried it in the past and it didn't work I suggest to try it again paying careful attention to what you add. Remember- a good compost pile will not stink!

Happy Gardening!

5 Tips ALL Gardeners Need To Know

Here are 5 small tips that anyone just starting to get into gardening should know, for some of us it is a good reminder.

1. Know your zone and average last frost date. Planting varieties and plants for your zone will ensure a better harvest. But it also helps you to know when you can plant all the different plants in your garden.


2. Plant veggies in a location that gets 8 hours of sunlight. Some can tolerate some shade, but for most of them to have enough energy to produce the fruit or veggie, at least 8 hours of sunlight is essential (more is good).


3. Tomatoes are fair weather plants. Tomatoes need a fairly long growing season, but if it gets too hot during the summer (85 degrees or more), they will stop producing. They also do not like the weather to be too cold. Boy do they grow well when the weather is good! Pretty much when I don’t like to be outside- neither do they…


4. There are many flowers and herbs that are beneficial to plant next to plants in your garden such as: marigolds and tomatoes, chives and carrots, mint and cabbage family plants. This is called companion planting. They not only keep some of the bad bugs away when planted together, but some help to make the veggies taste even better.


5. Do not add manure that hasn't aged properly! It contains too much nitrogen at that point and will burn your plants. Adding nice compost and manure to your garden every year will greatly improve the soil in your garden. Your plants will thank you.

It’s that time of year...  Happy Gardening!

Preparing your soil in the spring

Soil is literally the foundation of your garden. A great foundation to your garden will bring a great harvest. The key to good garden soil is deep, loose, fertile and well-draining soil.

How do you obtain this, you ask? Well, no matter the kind of soil, clay, sand the very best thing you can do for your soil is to add lots and lots of organic matter every year. Organic matter is anything that is no longer alive( accept meet and dog and cat feces carry too much disease). So things like leaves in the fall and small wood shavings and anything that was green at one time counts as organic matter. That includes steer manure and composted plants.

If you are starting a new bed for your garden in the spring, then make sure you add lots of organic matter, and every year thereafter. You can buy bags of steer manure and peat moss to mix into the soil if you do not want to make your own compost. Things like wood chips are considered organic matter, but they take such a long time to break down that they are not the best option to add to your garden soil. After the plants are planted in the early summer, we add a nice compost as a dressing on top of the soil and around the plants to help keep moisture in the soil and cool the roots of the vegetables. We do not gather this up, but rather leave it and add more next year. This would count as adding organic matter. They we add chopped up leaves with the lawn mower in the fall with a little nitrogen fertilizer to break it down. Free excellent organic matter- it cant get better than that. 

Here is a picture of leaf mold which is leaves just broken down from a few years ago. This makes an excellent amendment to the soil.