Prepping your garden to winter over

[thompson589741]

if you haven't noticed by my avatar picture, I have chickens. And January is the time that we start prepping the garden for harsh weather (nope december is not our harsh weather time)

I don't grow many cool weather crops, mainly because my family would look at me in disgust, so not using my time for them. So my garden does not need to be ready for planting until April.

Every January we clean the coop out of all the bedding, straw, and well chicken poo and dump it right on the garden. Now "fresh" chicken poo is too "hot" (of full of nitrogen) to plant in, and it will burn most plants, and then there is the worry of disease and things like that as well; so you have to let chicken manure "age", or set in the sun, for at least 2 months. Usually I can tell when it is safe to plant once the weeds start sprouting up.

Last year was the first time I did this with a large amount of coop bedding and my plants were like MUTANTS! I had never had so many cucumbers and vigorous tomato plants since I started gardening.

so if you know anyone near you with chickens, it never hurts to ask if you could have some chicken manure for your garden. your plants will love you for it!


So what do you do to your garden over the winter to get it ready for spring planting?

[TiggerToo]

Nice! I wish we had some coops around here. I unfortunately don't do anything to prepare. I live in MN and beginning in Dec it is just too darn cold to do anything and the ground is completely frozen over. I hibernate for about 4 months and then start peeking my head out about late April/May!

[janastanley]

We don't have chickens anymore. I hope to have a new flock next year. We spent some time outside prepping our garden for next year. We tore out old plants and turned over the compost pile really well. We added TONS of leaves to the compost. I gathered 20+ bags of leaves from friends this year and we are in the process of dumping them into the garden beds to partially compost over the winter. We wanted to rototill them into the soil, but we waited too long and the ground is frozen. I normally do that in a few garden beds each year, and it works really well. We are expanding our garden next year, so I rounded up more leaves then normal.

The only things we have wintering over are some leeks, kale, and mustard greens. The rhubarb and herbs do fine too. We cover them with pine needles and that seems to do the trick.