November Garden Chores

 Warm fall days are the perfect time to catch upon those garden chores that you’ve been putting off or may have been delayed because of our late October/early November storm.  Chores including: cleaning up the perennial and vegetable beds, raking the leaves off the lawn, adding mulch to roses and perennials, spreading soil amendments on the vegetable garden, wrapping young trees, planting some spring-flowering bulbs. First of all, finish cleaning up. Lingering vegetation in the vegetable and perennial beds leaves the garden with an unkempt appearance and affords the opportunity for insects and disease to winter over. 

If you want to provide shelter for solitary bees, buy or make a bee house. Next, gather up any leaves that last week’s storm may have left on the lawn.  Use them to improve the vegetable garden, by scattering them across the top of the beds, then adding two or three inches of compost. The leaves will break down over the course of the winter, improving soil structure and protecting soil microbial life. Even if you don’t have any leaves, top dressing your garden beds with organic material this time of year will improve soil health and structure, protect those all-important micro-organisms living in your garden soil and make your spring preparation much easier. 

Bagged compost such as Earth Essentials Sheep, Peat and Compost make it easy to add organic material to your beds. A one cubic foot bag of Sheep, Peat and Compost will cover ten square feet, two inches deep. Now's the time to add mulch to your perennials. Four or five inches of mulch will help preserve moisture and keep the ground stable through the winter. Use a prepared mulch such as Gorilla Hair Mulch, Western Cedar Mulch or Soil Pep.  As to those lingering chores. 

There’s still time to wrap young trees to protect them from winter damage. There’s still time to plant some bulbs for spring color. There’s still time to send a soil sample to Colorado State University for testing. And there should always be time to walk through the garden.  Even in November, time spent outside is good for you and your garden.