As another Michigan garden season winds down gardeners should be evaluating what worked and didn’t work in their Michigan gardens. Hopefully you kept the names of the varieties you planted in a notebook, or kept the plant tags near them. If something did very well in your garden or very poorly, you’ll probably want to write down the variety names so you can find or avoid them next spring.
Some areas of Michigan have already experienced frost by mid-September, although in most places it wasn’t a killing frost. But if any of your garden crops have finished such as sweet corn or beans you can clean those areas out now. As soon as a killing frost hits the rest, get rid of the dead and dying plants. Unlike flower beds where clean-up in the fall is an option and some perennials lend winter interest or feed the birds, vegetable gardens need to be thoroughly cleaned up in the fall.
Cleaning the vegetable garden up means removing any dead or dying plant parts and also means removing fallen fruits or discarded vegetative parts. Get rid of all weeds too. Doing this eliminates some disease organisms and insects which can lurk in garden beds over winter in debris. It also gives you bare soil to amend and helps prevent unwanted volunteer plants in the spring.
If you have chickens or other poultry fall is a fine time to turn them into the vegetable garden, after all crops are harvested. They’ll find over wintering insects and weed seeds, and clean up rotting produce while tilling and adding manure to your soil.
Soil amendments
If you have access to manure, fall is the time to apply it liberally in the garden. This gives it time to age so it won’t burn plants in the spring and also helps avoid organisms like salmonella, carried in manure. Cooler fall air keeps the neighbors windows closed and avoids complaints about smell too.
If you don’t have manure those fallen leaves are a good soil amendment. If you can, shred them before applying to the garden. You can rake them into a spot where you can use a mulching mower on them or rent a shredder. Six inches of leaves on your beds isn’t too much. If you don’t have leaves add chopped hay or straw.
Compost, of course, is excellent for the garden. You can’t add too much of this, pile it on as deep as you can. Organic matter of any kind, whether it is manure, leaves or compost is the answer to soil texture problems. It corrects heavy clay soil and sandy, dry soils.
Fall is a good time to have your soil tested. If your pH is low lime can be added or if it’s high sulfur or aluminum sulfite can added to adjust the pH. These products work best if they are in the soil for a few months before planting. Don’t add fertilizers to the soil in the fall. By spring most of the nutrients will have washed down into the soil too deeply for plant roots or will have degraded.
Cover crops
Many people praise the advantages of planting cover crops. Cover crops can take the place of all the amendments listed above and add organic material to the soil. Some cover crops also fix nitrogen in the soil and may add beneficial bacteria. Cover crops work on the premise that plants will grow in the cooler fall temperatures but be killed by winter. You then till them into the ground in the spring.
For smaller gardens cover crops can be a hassle, particularly if you use raised beds. But on a large garden you may want to experiment with cover crops to see if they suit your garden and your garden habits. Cover crops for Michigan gardeners include annual rye, buckwheat, and oats. These need to be planted by October 1. You can usually find annual rye grass seed in stores that carry grass seed for fall planting. Look at a farm store for buckwheat and oats.
You must clean up the garden beds and till the soil before planting cover crops. If fall is dry the cover crop seeded area should be watered so the crops sprout and grow before really cold weather.
In the spring the dead cover crop will need to be turned into the soil with a rototiller. If the plants grew very tall in the fall before dying, you may have to mow the area before using a tiller on it in the spring.
Take care of equipment
When the garden is cleaned in the fall also remove things like tomato cages, bean teepees and any garden art like scarecrows. When everything is done and tidied up, bring all your garden tools inside where they won’t be exposed to weather. Empty gas from mowers and tillers or add gas stabilizer.
Tools will stay sharp and rust free if the blades are stores in a tub of sand to which you have added a quart or two of cheap vegetable oil. Engine oil used to be recommended but that poses a disposal problem in the spring. However if you don’t dump the sand-oil in the spring and use it all year, engine oil could be used.
Your fall garden work should consist of getting as much organic matter into your vegetable beds as possible and amending soil pH if a soil test reveals a need. In the spring your plants will be off to a good start with freshly renewed soil nutrients.
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