10 Winter Gardening Tips for Gardeners in the North

Winter can beautiful with the fresh fallen snow and the brisk winter air can even exhilarate your senses, but for your perennials and groundcovers, winter can be their demise. Groundcovers and perennials have shallow roots putting them at risk of winter damage. It is important to take extra precautions to ensure that your hard work was in vain and your perennials and groundcover come back the next season in their full glory. Here are a few suggestions to keep in mind:

1) Fall is the time to get busy with your raking and fall clean up. Pruning back evergreen boughs, roses, and other perennials ensure you will have healthy plants come spring.

2) Save the pruning trimmings from your evergreen boughs. They are an excellent source of protection for many perennials and rose bushes.

3) There are various different types of mulch and dependant upon what you are covering will determine what type of mulch you should use. Over all, the best much is straw. Mulching helps protect your plants from freezing, repeated thaws and refreezing of the soil and holds snow that acts as an insulator. Mulching is most effective if done after the ground starts to freeze. By this time, rodents that may chose to use your plant for their winter feast, have already found a new place to nest plus your plants will be completely dormant. Thanksgiving time is generally a good marker as to when to start mulching, but watch the weather and temperatures to ensure you do it before the ground has frozen solid. Some common mulch for winter is pine needles, leaves, straw, hay, or shredded bark. If using leaves, make sure they are chopped and disease free. This ensures that there is no transfer of disease that could harm your plants, as well as, the weight of the leaves matting down on your plants. Three to four inches of mulch should be sufficient to protect your plants unless specified otherwise. Once the mulch is in place, gently pull it away from the base of plant to give the plant room to breath. Ornamental plants and strawberries also benefit from mulch protection.

4) Roses require a bit more attention then most of your perennials. They need to be pruned back and then mounded 8 to 12 inches with soil, peat moss, or sawdust. After mounding them with chosen mulch, evergreen boughs can be placed over that to entrap snow, giving your roses a constant moisture supply throughout the winter. If your roses are in a high wind area, it is recommended that you protect the mound and mulch with either a snow fence or chicken wire could be place over and staked to hold the boughs in place. You always have the option of digging up your roses and storing them in a cool basement or cellar.

5) Your evergreens and shrubbery can benefit from mulching and building windbreaks for them to keep the bitter winds away. You can go to your local hardware or home and garden store and purchase snow fence material in bulk rows. The one I have used is orange, made out of a firm plastic material, and looks a lot like soccer net. With a few posts, some cable ties, and a roll of snow fence, you can divert that bitter wind. Wrapping the bases with burlap also helps protect your shrubbery and evergreens from the harshness of winter.

6) It is not necessary to fertilize in the fall. This is the time of the season you want your plants to go dormant. By fertilizing them in the fall will only encourages new growth leaving them vulnerable to damaging affects winter can have on them.

7) Bonsai plants are becoming more popular then ever now days but require extra attention before the winter snow falls. If not potted, you can do one of two things. You can dig it up and store in a cold basement or cellar or build a hut for it to cover it. By building a hut you are actually building a wooden box that you would flip over the top of your Bonsai plant to allow it to go dormant but still protect it from the winter harms. You can also use wooden whiskey barrels flipped over your bonsai plants.

8) Mulching is not always an option for all plants, but protection is needed just the same, in these situations, much like the bonsai plant, you could use whiskey barrels flipped over the plant or build tee pees and wrap the tee pee frame with burlap. Pallets also make great protection for shrubbery that mulching does not work well with. Often times you can get pallets free at local factories. The pallets do not need to be in top condition. Often, when pallets begin to crack or become worn, factories just dispose of them. By using four pallets, you can frame out the shrub and secure the sides in place. This is a cheap way to provide protection for many of your shrubberies and young trees.

9) It is important to protect your young trees bark. Your local farm and garden supply store offers a tree wrap that you can use to wrap the base of your tree to protect it from critters eating its bark and from winter cracking. You can also simply paint the base of the tree up about two feet with white latex paint or wrap it with tinfoil. This will also keep the critters away. Since young trees have not built up the stamina to withstand harsh winter winds, after securing them from critters, it is wise to purchase tree guards to place around them. Tree guards are hard plastic cylinders cut down one side and very simple and quick to place around your tree. Snow fences are also a wise idea. After protecting the trunk from critters and harsh winds, you can also mulch. It is not wise to mulch before the later two things are done though. Mulch makes a nice nesting ground for the critters that you are trying to prevent from feasting on your saplings.

10) Water and soil moisture are important things to keep in mind, especially with your larger ground covers. Make sure in late fall that you have saturated the root base of your plant, tree, ground cover or shrubbery before mulching. This gives them something to draw from during their winter hibernation.

If you have specific plants that you are concerned about protecting over the winter months, contact your local greenhouse or Arboretum. You will find them more then happy to educate you on your concerns. If neither is a possibility, you can always search for your particular plant on line or check with the Department of Agriculture plant data base at http://plants.usda.gov/