4 steps to prepare your garden for winter with compost

When the leaves begin falling it's time to start getting your garden ready for winter. To help prepare the soil for the cold months ahead and ensure it's ready for spring, here are four simple steps for creating and using a winter compost of dead leaves.

[Image Credit: iStock.com/tbradford]

The first thing to do is to rid your garden of diseased, dying plants including those infested with insects. Winter will only exacerbate these conditions, so it's best to get rid of them ahead of the cold.

• Make sure you keep diseased plants away from your compost pile. That’ll prevent you from adding those diseases back into the soil in the spring when you spread the compost again.

Cut back perennials to under 15 cm (six inches) after the first frost.

• The plant should be dead before you cut it back, but it will have its energy stored in the roots to allow it to grow again in the spring.
• Get rid of any other unsightly or slimy plants so you can easily spread compost in the areas that need it before winter begins in earnest.

Compost feeds the soil with nutrients so that it doesn't dry out and become unhealthy over the winter. It's basically like adding live food to the ground to help keep the plants and vegetables in your garden nourished, even when the ground freezes over.

• To get your garden ready for winter and ensure enough nutrients are available for the plants, spread 2.5 to 15.25 cm (one to six inches) of compost or composted manure over the soil.

You can work on building a compost pile all year round from things like kitchen food waste, yard waste, straw, leaves and grass.

• Keep the pile going all winter so that you have fresh compost to use in spring. It can be a slow process in the winter when Canada's temperatures can drop well below freezing.
• In some more northerly locations you'll have to wait until spring to start a new pile. However, if you get a lot of sunshine in your garden, you can keep the pile in a sunny spot so that the frost melts from it.

Remember to keep the pile filled with carbon-rich material from greens and kitchen scraps and to turn it frequently.

• Compost tumblers are a great system for turning and storing compost in icy weather.

Follow these steps and you'll have a fresh and healthy compost pile for your soil when the Canadian spring rolls around.