Winter
Here in Zone 7a, winter – as defined as temperatures consistently below freezing during the night and usually below freezing during the daytime – sets in towards the end of December or very early January.
We who are lucky enough to reside in the “I-95 Corridor” of Zone 7a also benefit from the atmospheric phenomenon resulting from being located on the eastern United State’s “Fall Line”. This imaginary “line” helps keep winter snow at bay and greatly reduces snowfall when it does occur (see this excellent post from 6ABC (WPVI) Meteorologist, Adam Joseph, on the wonders of living between the New Jersey coastal plain and the Appalachian piedmont).
Even if you’re buried deep in snow and your garden has been dormant since early October, here are three things you can do to keep yourself garden-active and ensure a successful garden next year.
Plan next year’s garden
I belong to a gardening group on Facebook and they always talk about the joys of keeping a garden journal.
I have to admit, I’m terrible at keeping a journal. I take my journal with me into the garden, get busy planting and weeding and then never write anything down. I come back into the house with the same blank pages I started with when I went out to garden.
If you’re not the “I love to keep a diary” sort, may I suggest you keep a photo journal? I simply use my smartphone. I take pictures of all my growing beds and I do it during various times (after initial transplanting, right before harvesting, etc.). As the old adage suggests: “A picture is worth a thousand words” and my pictures show me exactly how my plants have (or have not) grown – which are healthier, which are too crowded (I’m a terrible over-crowder), exactly how tall my sunflowers grew, etc. It’s an invaluable record that speaks to me much more clearly than if I had simply written down “sunflowers did good, grew 12′). The picture shows me exactly how they grew, what color mixtures I had (and what would look better next year). The pictures even help me locate exactly where I planted certain plants so I don’t accidentally dig them up while there dormant, thinking the spot is “empty”.
Keep a photo journal. You’ll be a happier gardener if you do!
Fun with houseplants
If you’re like me, you bring in your houseplants sometime around October after watching them thrive through a hot and humid Mid-Atlantic summer. Around November, I find myself begging my houseplants to just hang on until springtime when they can return to the outdoors.
Now, just because it’s hard to overwinter houseplants that have been spoiled by outside summer weather, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do a little indoor plant maintenance during the winter. This can be an excellent time to try some propagation (as I’m doing with my African Violets), transplanting those plants that are very pot-bound, or applying a top-dressing of fresh potting soil to plants that are too big to transplant.
Clean up your garden the right way
Around the end of February, the temperatures start to climb and you may be tempted to start your spring clean-up and remove all the dead growth from your garden beds (assuming you didn’t do a fall clean-up, also a no-no). I’m going to urge you not to do it just yet. What you may not realize is lurking in all those dead flower heads and stems are some very beneficial invertebrates trying to overwinter in your garden. If they are successful, the next generation will return to this same spot again. The same happens with pest invertebrates, which is why we practice crop rotation – it keeps those pests searching for where their host plant got to after winter.
Did you know Pennsylvania has over 300 species of native bees? Did you know that many native bees nest in the stalks of flowers? This is one good reason not to prune off the dead growth from winter – you may be throwing out next season’s bee population!
A good rule of thumb is to prune back dead growth only after the weather has been consistently above 50 degrees (Fahrenheit) for seven or more days in a row (day and night temperature). It’s also a good idea to leave what you’ve cut in a loose pile on your compost heap – allowing any insects that are pupating or in diapause a chance to still escape as the temperatures warm and the sunlight increases.
Here’s a great article on how to do spring cleanups the right way.