In the time between the summer heat and autumn’s harvest is the best time to think ahead to the colder months and prepare in advance for the winter to come.
If you do a little preparation in the autumn, you can improve your soil for next year.
While you may be putting your garden to "bed" for the winter, a lot of repair can happen during that time to build soil health and fertility.
The majority of these winter prep tasks that are based on the principles of regenerative gardening and permaculture principles.
Below is an in-depth look at practices to prepare your garden for winter that will build soil health, promote biodiversity, and increase the positive environmental benefits of your garden.
One of the most important things that you can do in your regenerative garden to support the health of the soil and of the planet is to plant a cover crop.
This is because anytime plants are growing, they are sequestering carbon within the process of photosynthesis. So when it’s winter and you have no plants growing, no photosynthesis is happening, so no additional carbon capture is happening.
It should be noted that in order to gain the most environmental impact, that the root systems of the cover crop should be left in the ground upon termination. If the plants die back during the depths of winter on their own, then this is taken care of for you. If the plants survive the winter, then you will need to manually cut back the crop or use a tool like a roller crimper to make the garden beds available for springtime planting.
In addition to carbon sequestration, cover crops enhance the soil in ways that will allow you to water crops less in the growing season, while also attracting beneficial insects that will help to eat garden pests. This means less resources for watering, and potentially less temptation to turn to synthetic pesticides.
Since cover crops add nutrition to the soil, you may need to buy less fertilizer in the coming season. Cover crops can help to reduce weed growth, which means less work keeping rows free of weeds as well. Lastly, many cover crops flower before going to seed. If you let the plants flower and cut them back right before they go to seed, you can provide food for bees and other pollinators.
All of this leads in to not needing to till the soil to prepare for the next garden season, further reducing the amount of greenhouse gases released from the soil.
(sources: sare.org, epa.gov, fao.org, essi.org, michiganradio.org)
Build more resiliency and self sufficiency into your garden by saving your own seeds. During this time of year, many plants have likely gone to seed. If these plants are healthy, robust, and free from disease, gather the seeds and store them in labeled envelopes in a dry space.
Saving seeds gives you the ability to select for traits that will help your vegetables to thrive in the coming years in your garden. You can select plants that have flourished under the conditions that you are able to provide or wish to provide for your garden. This allows you to work towards a more low-input garden, saving costs on fertilizer, water, and other resources.
When we save seeds, we also inherently become stewards of heirloom varieties - some of which are rare or becoming hard to find. This means that we are taking part in continuing the lineages, stories, and traditions infused into each heirloom variety.
Now is the time to make leaf mold, build up compost, and mulch beds; connect with neighbors and ask if you can take their raked leaves to add to your garden beds and compost bins
As a free and abundant resource, leaves are one of the best things that you can bring into your garden either as a mulch, or as a way to bulk up your compost.
As a mulch, it is best to shred leaves before spreading them on your garden. This will help the leaves to decompose and turn into a soil-enhancing material by the time the next growing season approaches.
Leaf mold is a type of mulch that is made by composting leaves in their own pile. This process takes about a year to complete, but once you’ve gathered the leaves into a quiet corner of your garden, it’s completely hands off. The leaf mold becomes fine in texture and acts more like a compost when you add it to your soil the following autumn.
According to the USDA, the leaves as mulch provide food for soil microorganisms, who will break it down to add organic matter to build soil health.
Tying into the previous task, this is a good time to also gather any organic straw or hay to mulch the remaining unplanted beds in your garden. A mulched garden bed is like a safe haven for soil life, while creating added soil health in return.
Mulching has the benefit of keeping water in the soil, and keeping the soil temperature cool in the summer and warmer in the winter. Mulching reduces weed pressure while bringing in more nutrients to the soil, and builds resilience into the garden (source). All of these components combine to improve soil structure, fertility, and health (source).
Mulching is a great way to keep the soil covered during times when the garden is not planted, and in this way you practice one of the key principles of regenerative gardening. As Jesse Frost says in the Living Soil Handbook, keep it covered! This also helps reduce soil erosion over the off-season.
Overwintering food crops are such a joy, as they provide food early in the season and are mostly low maintence.
October is the best time to plant garlic for an early summer harvest the following year. Cold-hardy fava beans can also be sown for a spring harvest, as well as onions and leeks. As is the theme with this guide, mulch the rows heavily to keep in warmth and moisture, which will help ensure their success during the colder months. While garlic can be mulched directly at planting time, I would wait until the other over-wintering crops of fava and onion have sprouted in the soil to mulch around them.
One of the best tools that a regenerative farmer or gardener has is their compost pile! Utilize these last weeks of lawn growth to mow and add organic matter to the compost.
Now is also the perfect time make a compost bin if you need an additional one, or if you don’t have one already
Once the compost is ready in the following year, it will build soil health and feed microbes and fungi. These soil microbiota make nutrients available to your plants. Everybody wins!
While the compost pile may be slow going in the colder months, a vermicomposting system will continue to work for you even in the dead of winter.
Vermicompost is a powerful solution for diverting waste from the landfill and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while also building soil health.
In total, 9.2 bn tonnes of CO2e emissions each year can be attributed to global food waste. To put that into perspective, that’s equivalent to the overall emissions from the US and the EU put together (source).
A vermicomposting system is a way to feeding your kitchen scraps to worms, and can be done inside or outside. In winter, if you bring your vermicomposting system indoors or in a garage, it will continue to thrive.
Vermicompost is rich in nutrients, fungi, and beneficial microorganisms, including nitrogen fixing bacteria and phosphorus stabilizers (source). Vermicompost has also been shown to help soil retain moisture and decreases pest damage and disease at the same time (source), (source).
Making vermicompost at home can provide you with an alternative to fertilizers, which is especially beneficial if you have been applying synthetic fertilizers, since they have a high carbon footprint. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers alone account for the same amount of GHG emissions as commercial aircraft, so anyway that we can reduce our usage of this in our gardens and farms, the better it is for the environment (source).
Some herbs and flowers have evolved to only sprout after experiencing the cold temperatures of winter.
While you can simulate winter by putting the seeds in the refrigerator or freezer for specific lengths of time in the late winter, sowing these seeds now means that you’ll have more room in your fridge, and have less work to do during the busy seed starting months.
Essentially, you’re helping along what would have happened naturally. Instead of the plant dropping its seeds to be exposed to the cold temperatures it needs to trigger germination, you are sowing the seeds yourself, but giving them the same experience.
As you harvest crops and cut back spent plants, implement a chop and drop system to nourish the soil and return the plants nutrients back into the earth.
Essentially, chop and drop is a technique often utilized in permaculture and regenerative farms and gardens to return nutrients to the soil. You chop back any above ground parts of the plant, leaving the roots in the ground. Then, you simply leave the chopped part of the plants on top of the soil.
During the growing season, these chopped back plant materials can act as a light mulch. But during the winter months, you’ll probably have a lot of residue to return back to the soil. You can sow your cover crop into this residue, or further enrich the soil by adding more organic mulch materials on top.
Soil amendments such as nettle, comfrey, borage, or dandelion long-brewed compost tea are sources of natural fertility and are excellent to make during this time as you cut back any weeds and herbs in your garden clean up process.
Cut back any remaining growth on these plants. The easiest way to make an herbal extract for your garden is to simply place the plant material into a 5 gallon bucket and fill it with water. Place a cover over the bucket loosely, and store it in a place where it won’t freeze overwinter. Then, in the spring when you’re starting to plant seedlings out and growth is coming back on your perennial plants, you can dilute the liquid extract with water (usually 20:1 or 10:1 is recommended) and apply this to your soil for an organic boost (source, source).
If you make your herbal soil amendments now, they will have a few months to brew over winter, and will be ready for application in the spring time.
One of the easiest ways to prevent disease from spreading to vulnerable seedlings is to sanitize any seed starting equipment, such as trays, soil blockers, and cells.
It’s nice to get this done during the quiet months of autumn and winter, so that everything is ready come February (or even earlier!) when you start sowing seeds again.
Some seedling trays are made to go in the dishwasher, such as these from gardener’s supply. Other types don’t specify. In cases where no cleaning method is specified, I take a square of an old t-shirt and douse it in 5% vinegar. I then use the cloth to apply the vinegar to my seed starting equipment, refreshing the cloth as necessary. I find that a facecloth is too thick to get into the nooks and crannies of a seed cell tray, but something thin like t-shirt scraps is perfect. I then let everything air dry before stacking it to store inside.
Take time to make notes for next year and plan out what will be planted where
While it can take a bit of extra effort, crop rotation has a lot of benefits. In fact, it’s been found that crop rotation enhance soil life diversity and population.
A study from 2021 saw that crop rotation increased carbon storage in the soil while building the soil food web and making more nutrients bioavailable to plants. This in turn increased soil resiliency to pest issues and abnormal weather.
The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University studied crop rotation from 2006 - 2014 and found that longer rotations of 3+ years gave the soil a boost in organic matter, microbes, and nutrient availability.
They also found that compared to a 2 year rotation system, a 4 year rotation had 40% less soil erosion, higher crop yields, and far less disease (source).
Will you be expanding your garden next growing season? Now is the time to prepare the soil for next year’s planting so that you don’t need to till the soil, which has negative environmental consequences.
This autumn, you can apply a heavy layer of mulch or a tarp over areas where you’ll be expanding your garden or areas that became particularly weedy in the past year. This will slowly kill back the grass or weeds, while enriching the soil at the same time.
Come spring, you’ll be able to add some compost and plant into the ground - far less work than tilling the soil!
In many climates, autumn and winter provide ample precipitation that can be captured and stored for later use. A water catchment system off of a roof or other appropriate structure that syncs up with a rain barrel can help save on water costs and build resiliency into your growing season.
Collecting rainwater is a must if you live in an area that frequently sees drought during the growing season.
Extending the growing season is one of the best ways to become more self-sufficient, and it also helps with the regenerative motto of keeping plants growing in the ground and keeping the soil covered for as long as possible.
If you have row covers or a greenhouse, experiment with growing hardy crops such as salad greens, kale, beets, carrots, turnips, and broccoli, just to see what happens.
If this is your first time growing plants over winter, take note of sowing dates and your results so that you can make adjustments for next year, or follow on with successes year after year.
With autumn windstorms, hurricanes, and winter snow on the way, this is the time when arborists and power companies are cleaning up fallen branches and trees from roadways. Did you know that these trees get turned into wood chips that you can often access for free?
If you live in an urban or suburban area, check out chipdrop.com. If you are more rural, you should still get on the list, but it might take a bit longer for a load of woodchips to come your way. We’ve found that in rural areas, it’s more effective to call up a local arborist or the power company to get on a list for a chip drop. I’ve also been known to flag down a wood chip truck or two to get access to some free chips.
The wood chips can be applied to paths over winter to prevent weeds from growing, or can be used as a mulch around perennial plants.
Read up on regenerative practices and soil microbiology with Jeff Lowenfel’s series on soil health. It will open your eyes to the multitude of relationships happening in the soil, which in turn nourishes your plants, captures carbon, and assists in photosynthesis. I feel like these books are a must-read for anyone who considers themselves an environmental steward, or who wants to understand more about the science of regenerative gardening.
Before you go, are you like me and gobble up all the garden reading you can during the off season? Check out this list of books that will help you create a more sustainable and regenerative garden so that you can up your garden game for next season!
