How to Winterize Your Garden

Once the summer harvest has come to an end and all your crops have frozen with the first cold nights of October, my guess is you and your garden are ready for a break!  

Summer crops use up key nutrients like nitrogen and potassium in the soil.  As gardeners, we can also feel “used up” at the end of summer after harvesting our 20^th giant zucchini, lugging pounds of heavy tomatoes (if you’ve over planted like I often do), or killing squash beetle after squash beetle.  

Fall (October/November) is the best time to tuck our gardens in for a winter slumber and let the garden and ourselves rest. You are “buttoning down the hatches” for winter’s ice and snow and preparing your garden to renew again in the spring to start the cycle over.  

Here are some helpful tips for winterizing your garden! 

Harvest all summer crops before the first hard freeze: 

• Typically, Reno experiences a hard fall frost in mid-October. At this point all summer crops (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) will die. Reno’s first frost date for 2024 was October 18^th  

• Cool weather crops (lettuce, kale, radishes, carrots) don’t dislike a frost, so these can be kept in the soil if they are still growing and perhaps, they will keep growing through the winter 

• If tomatoes are still green, they can be picked, placed in a brown paper bag in a cabinet and then they will ripen on their own  

Turn off irrigation: 

• Disconnect and turn off irrigation for the season. This is key so nothing leaks or breaks when it freezes 

• If you have a spigot and timer, disconnect the timer and take indoors 

• If you have in ground irrigation, turn off water main, and let all drip emitters open so they can drip out any water left in the line 

Chop summer crops at their base to leave root systems intact:  

• Instead of pulling the whole plant out, chopping at the base keeps the delicate soil ecosystem beneath the roots alive and healthy through the winter 

• You can then chop up these plants for your own compost pile or “chop and drop them directly” on your garden beds to act as a mulch layer 

• I would only recommend “chop and drop” with leafy greens, peas, or roots not tomatoes, squash or peppers  

• Here is a helpful video for this process: 

Add mulch to the soil: 

• Mulch (leaves, straw, woodchips) cover the soil during cold winter months and start breaking down into healthy soil by spring  

• Add a ~2 inch layer of mulch over your garden beds during the winter  

• By doing this, you also create winter homes for some caterpillars and pollinators who nest over the winter in dried leaves  

• Chip Drop in Reno is a great source for FREE wood chips delivered to your home, although you never know how much you’ll get!  

  
  

Trim perennials: 

• If you have perennial plants that come back every year (most herbs, shrubs, flowers), cut back dead foliage to the base 

• This will help the plan focus on root growth during the winter and explode into the spring!

Those are the most important things to do to winterize your garden, so it will be in good shape for you to start planting come spring. Happy GROWing!