Use your containers to make winter arrangements

Remove frozen plants from containers and hanging baskets, and replace them with evergreen boughs, branches with colorful berries, and interesting seed heads from perennials and ornamental grasses.

Garden centers will have lots of options to choose from for decorating your containers if you do not have materials available in your garden.

Push ends of the stems into the growing medium in the container, as it works well to support the branches.

• Have your garden soil tested to determine how best to manage it and what fertilizers to use. Make a composite sample from a few areas in the bed and send it in for testing.

If your garden is large, then it is a good idea to break the garden into zones to test. Soils in the Chicago area tend to have adequate phosphorus levels, so in these situations, choose fertilizers that do not have phosphorus in them or very small amounts.

A soil test will confirm the status of your garden soil.

• Clean out your gutters once all leaves have fallen. Leaves will clog up the gutters and be very difficult to remove if frozen.

• Be sure to disconnect your garden hoses from spigots on your house to reduce the chance of freezing. Turn off the water to these spigots if they are not frost free to avoid damage from the pipes freezing as the weather gets colder.

• Tim Johnson is director of horticulture at Chicago Botanic Garden, chicagobotanic.org.