8 Ways to Prepare Your Garden and Lawn for Fall

If you want to know how to prepare your garden and lawn for fall, then you are at the right place. Here at YourDailyPlace, we mentioned the top 8 ways to prepare your garden and lawn for fall. A system will make fall yard and garden prep much faster and easier.

The gentle sound of leaves falling on the lawn can only mean one thing: it’s time to start preparing your home for the cool season. Depending on the plants and grasses in your landscape, this could mean just a few minor tasks, or it could mean a long list of chores. Here’s a quick guide to getting your lawn and garden ready for fall.

So, let’s get started. 

8 Ways to Prepare Your Garden and Lawn for Fall

Below we mentioned the top 8 ways to prepare your garden and lawn for fall:

1. Handle Fallen Leaves

One of the most difficult fall chores for most homeowners is cleaning up the crispy leaves that fall everywhere. Raking and bagging may be the best solution for some, but it is not for everyone. After all, leaves are nothing more than nutrients waiting to be utilized.

Rather than raking leaves, mulch them with your lawn mower. The ground-up leaves will enrich your soil with nutrients and organic matter.

Applying leaves to trees, landscape perennials, and vegetable beds is another way to use them. You’ll be able to nurture even more plants if you can get extras from your neighbors, who will certainly gladly part with bags and bags of them.

Fungi love to surround the roots of woody crops like fruit trees.  Leaf mould is a simple way to give these trees what they desire. Gardeners can prepare leaf mould by gathering leaves in large plastic bags, poking holes all over the bags, and spraying down the leaves. The bags should be placed in a shady property area and sprayed down every few weeks. Fungi will begin to colonize after a few months, and the leaf mould will be ready to be placed around fruit trees.

2. Get Your Lawn Ready

With the leaves removed, you can focus on any fall lawn care your lawn may require. This varies depending on the type of grass, but if you have cool-season grasses, fall is the best time to do heavy work like aeration and dethatching.

“Cool-season lawn grasses like Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, tall fescue, and fine fescue perform best in the fall.” Heavy dethatching of cool-season lawns too late in the spring can weaken them just before the summer stress season.” Aerification of cool-season lawns can take place in the early spring or late fall.”

Renting tools to aerate and dethatch your lawn is a simple but time-consuming task for homeowners. Just make sure to do these jobs while the grass is still actively growing and to give the lawn enough time to heal from the necessary damage caused by these techniques before it frosts.

3. Protect Your Plants

Perennial plantings should be put to bed at the end of the growing season to help protect them from the impending freezing temperatures. Most gardeners prefer organic mulches because they break down slowly and add nutrients to the soil, but not all plants benefit from the same type of mulch. Trees and woody crops (non-herbaceous perennials) grow best in fungus-dominant mulches. Wood chips and bark mulch are the best mulches for plants in this category. Adding leaf mould is another excellent way to accelerate the breakdown of woody mulches.

“On the other hand, herbaceous perennials often do better with non-woody mulches that are more bacteria-dominant.” Because herbaceous perennials typically die back in the winter, the mulch cannot be so dense that it prevents new shoots from emerging in the spring. In these situations, straw, in my experience, builds soil faster than almost any other mulch.”

It’s also a good time to add compost to empty vegetable beds or plant cover crops to help keep the soil in place over the winter and early spring. Plow them under while they’re still growing in the spring for the best nutrient return to your garden.

4. Prepare Garden Equipment for the Off Season

Plants aren’t the only thing homeowners will have to deal with as the days grow colder and the nights grow longer. Lawn equipment also requires some attention before winter arrives.

It’s best to give your mower a good cleaning in the fall before storing it so you don’t give any rodents an opportunity to make an unwanted home.

5. Make a Proper Plan and Stick to it

For many homeowners, fall is a busy time in the lawn and garden, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Once you’ve determined what needs to be done, make a list of small tasks that can each be completed in a few hours and arrange them in the order in which they should be completed. For example, you could aerate and dethatch the lawn earlier, mulch afterward, and then take care of the garden equipment at the end of the season.

Getting everything done on time is critical to the success of your garden. Having a system in place will make things go much more quickly and easily this fall.

6. Fertilize Your Lawn

Fertilize your lawn four times a year for the best lawn in town. However, if you can only fertilize once a year, you will still have a great lawn if you fertilize only in the fall. Choose a fertilizer with the 4-1-2 ratio. (These figures represent the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium percentages in the fertilizer.) Consult a garden center expert to determine the best fertilizer blend for your fall grass type and local soil conditions. Check your average frost date to see when you should fertilize your lawn in the fall.

Apply the fertilizer three weeks before the season’s final mowing. Fertilizing in the fall gives the grassroots energy and nutrients as they multiply in cooler weather before the grass goes dormant. The roots also store food for the winter, giving the grass an initial growth spurt when it emerges from dormancy in the spring.

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7. Shorten the Grass

Before the snow falls, rake and remove all of the dead leaves. Otherwise, they will become sodden mats in the spring, suffocating the sprouting grass below. (Plus, raking dry leaves is much easier!)

Then, just for this season, set your mower to cut your grass short, at 1-1/2 or 2-inches. It will reduce the possibility of snow mould forming in cold climates. Tall grass blades will not lie down and suffocate the new grass next spring.

8. Prepare Your Property for Snow

Take a few minutes before the snow falls to inspect your property. Rocks, dog tie-out cables, extension cords, holiday light cords, and garden hoses should all be removed. Then, mark paths near gardens, so you don’t suck up rocks and garden edging with your snowblower. Driveway markers should be used to mark the perimeters of your walk and driveway. If the ground is frozen, drill a hole with your battery-powered drill and a masonry bit.

Conclusion

This is the end of this post about preparing your garden and lawn for fall. On the other hand, in this post, we mentioned 8 ways to prepare your garden and lawn for fall. I hope you like this post. 

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