Create compost for a healthier garden next spring
Even though days are getting shorter and the mercury in the thermometer is heading south, there is still plenty to do in the vegetable garden.
Continue harvesting vegetables as they ripen. If a light frost is in the forecast, cover warm-season crops like tomatoes and peppers with sheets or light blankets. If a hard frost seems likely, pick them even if they are not ripe yet. Store them in paper bags or cardboard boxes while they ripen.
Fall crops of cool-season vegetables, including lettuce, radishes, peas and spinach, don't mind a light frost and some vegetables, such as Brussels sprouts and kale, taste even better after a frost.
Continue to cut herbs that haven't flowered or set seed to use fresh or to dry or freeze. The flavor of herbs that have flowered or set seed has been compromised, so cut these back for the winter and put the plant debris in the compost pile.
If you don't already compost, fall is an ideal time to start. There is an abundance of brown ingredients. Mother nature provides gardeners with all the leaves they need and more. There are plenty of green materials from lawn clippings, plant debris and kitchen scraps. A few shovels full of soil from the garden and water from the hose are the only other elements needed.
Build or buy a compost bin or find an out of the way corner in the backyard. Start layering brown, green, brown, and green, adding a shovel full of soil to introduce soil organisms and microbes into the pile every few layers and enough water from the hose to keep the pile as moist as a rung-out sponge.
If the goal is to create compost as soon as possible, mix the pile every week or so with a garden fork and throw in a handful of high nitrogen fertilizer every couple of layers. Without them, nature will take its course and compost will still happen. It will just take longer.
Beets, carrots, leeks and turnips intended for winter harvest should be covered with a thick layer of mulch at the end of October or in early November, depending on the weather.
Be sure to keep the garden as clean as possible. As soon as plants have finished growing and all vegetables have been harvested, remove them from the garden. Pick up all fallen vegetables. After a hard frost, get rid of all the dead foliage. Do not compost any plants with disease or insect problems.
When all the plants have been removed from the garden, consider planting a cover crop. Cover crops, or green manure crops, improve the soil. They grow during fall and winter and are rototilled into the garden in spring.
While they grow, cover crops prevent soil loss due to erosion and reduce soil compaction. When they are rototilled into the garden in spring, they add organic matter to the soil, making it more fertile and improving its tilth.
If cover crops are not planted, work an inch or two of organic matter into the top six inches of soil with a rototiller or garden fork and cover the garden with shredded leaves to prevent soil loss during the winter.
Completing these tasks in the fall vegetable garden will help it wake up healthier in the spring and ready to grow even better vegetables next year.
• Diana Stoll is a horticulturist, garden writer and the garden center manager at The Planter's Palette in Winfield. She blogs at gardenwithdiana.com.