If you need a bit of motivation to perform fall lawn and garden care, just think of all the joy your lawn and planting beds provided you during the spring and summer.
Our American Steel Fencing® experts say that in order to get the same results next growing season, be careful and take the time to prepare the grass and planting areas for the cold months ahead. This is generally the best way to help your landscape get off to an exceptional start once the warm weather returns.
Feeding Your Lawn
Autumn is a critical time for improving the health of your grass for next year. Start by removing broadleaf weeds to minimize competition for available nutrients and water. Next, have a soil test done to check, for example, the soil pH of your lawn. If the test shows excessive acidity, apply lime instantly, as its effects don’t kick in right away.
Or, if your soil is too alkaline, apply sulphur. Testing your soil will also tell you whether it is compacted; if so, fall is the time for core aeration to help nutrients reach deep into the root zone. Follow aerating with reseeding, if applicable, and fertilizing.
If you have cool-season grasses, typically, the best time to fertilize is in late summer to early fall. This is sometimes called “bridge feeding. Our Oregon Modern Steel Fencing Experts say that since these grasses are most active during periods of moderate weather, not too hot, not too cold. it is mainly at this time that they can best use the nutrients created by a fertilizer. Fertilization helps with root growth and helps the lawn recover from the summer heat while preparing it for the next growing season.
Dealing With Leaves
Now when it comes to raking leaves, some people choose to use leaf blowers or to collect all the leaves and throw them in the garbage. Here’s a better alternative option: Prior to putting your lawnmower away for the winter, our Modern Steel Fence Experts suggest that you turn it back on real quick, making sure the grass catcher is attached try and run over the leaves with it.
Our Oregon Modern Steel Fence Experts recommend you try and save the shredded leaves for your compost pile, which tends to run low on “brown” materials over the winter. Keep the reserved leaves in extra garbage bins or any other dry place, and add them to the pile as needed.
You can also use the shredded leaves for garden mulch. And if you have more leaves than you can use and you must throw some out, shredding them with the lawnmower will make them far more compact, so you won’t have to use as many garbage bags.
Vegetable Gardens
After harvesting your fruits and flowers, our Oregon Modern Steel Fence Experts say that fall garden care should be at the top of your to-do list. Attempt to remove old plant matter from the garden, placing it in your compost bin. Leaving it behind in the garden would invite plant diseases next growing season.
Our Oregon Modern Steel Fence Experts say you will also need to protect your topsoil from the rigors of winter. You have two options here: You can plant a cover crop for large beds, or you can apply a mulch, which is more efficient for smaller beds. Now don’t forget that you’ll have a ready source of mulch in the leaves that you rake up or shred with the lawnmower.
Perennial Beds
Perennial garden beds, in a perfect world, should be cleaned up and mulched as part of your work in fall gardens. This is also a good time to remove old stalks and leaves. You would have to do this in the spring anyway, so you might as well be a step ahead, and the beds look tidier in the meantime.
However, if you are not able to mulch your perennial beds in the fall, then do not clean away the old stalks and leaves; they will serve as a makeshift mulch, affording some small degree of protection to the roots of your perennials. In other words, the cleaning and the mulching go together: either do both or neither one. But it is best to do both in order to keep your garden disease-free and well-insulated.
Trees and Shrubs
Winterize small deciduous shrubs that have fragile branches with a lean-to or some other kind of structure to keep heavy snow off their limbs. Most experienced Oregon Modern Steel Fence Experts will tell you that deciduous shrubs provide no interest in winter anyway, so you are not losing anything visually by covering them. Evergreens, by contrast, are the foundation of winter landscaping aesthetics.
To a certain degree, winterizing trees and larger shrubs can be achieved simply by watering them properly in fall since the winter damage that they sustain often stems from their inability to draw water from the frozen earth.
In late fall, after deciduous trees drop their leaves but prior to the ground freezing, give both evergreen and deciduous trees and shrubs a final deep watering to last them through the winter. The same source also reminds us to “water under the complete canopy area and beyond” to cover the entire root area.