It is officially time to start thinking about the upcoming gardening season. While winter isn’t the most active time for the garden (especially here in northern Utah), plenty can be done now to get ready for when the warm weather returns. Here are the winter gardening tasks I plan to tackle for my Zone 7 garden.
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Winter Gardening Tasks
Layout & Placement Planning
Before just about anything else, I need to get an idea of what I want to grow and where I want to grow it this year. I try to rotate my crops as best I can. But our yard and gardening space is pretty small, so I do the best I can. I’ve been using Seed Money’s Garden Planner app to plan out my space. It doesn’t have everything I’d like (like more herbs and fruit trees) but it beats sketching my plan out by hand.
Testing Last Year’s Seeds
Once I know what I want to grow, I need to go through any seeds I have and do a germination test to see if they’re still viable or if they need to be replaced. I’d love to be the type of gardener who harvests and saves her own seeds from year to year. But until that happens, I’ll be purchasing the seeds I need. I test the germination of my seeds by taking 10 seeds and placing them in a damp paper towel. Then I place that damp paper towel in a sealed plastic bag and put it on one of our warming mats. After that seed’s estimated time to germinate, I’ll check it and see if/how many seeds germinated. If at least have germinated, I’ll call it good and use that seed packet this year. If not, I’ll add it to my list of seeds I need to order.
Ordering Seeds
This task is both the most fun and the most dangerous. The seed catalogs are filled with so many cool, pretty, unique new plants and I want to grow EVERYTHING. It’s easy for my excitement to get the best of me and end up ordering seeds I don’t use. That’s why getting super clear on what I want to grow, what I have space for, and what seeds I already have is important before I even place a single seed order.
Prepare Seed Starting Supplies
I need to go through all of my seed starting supplies and make sure everything is clean, functional, and ready to go because I’ll be able to start some seeds as soon as mid-February. I’ll also need to make sure and stock up on seed starting medium.
Winter Prune The Fruit Trees
By the end of February, I’ll need to have given our fruit trees their winter prune to clean them up and get them into shape before they wake up from the dormant season. I highly recommend the book Grow A Little Fruit Tree by Ann Ralph if you’re interested in learning how to grow fruit trees in smaller spaces. I keep our trees quite small and that definitely hasn’t stopped our peach trees from producing like mad.
Fertilize Fruit Trees
Fruit trees should be fertilized at least 6 weeks before they bloom. So, provided it isn’t still too snowy, I plan to fertilize ours by the end of February.
Start Cold Hardy Seeds
There are several plants that I can get started indoors in February so that they’re ready to go out as soon as the weather warms. There are several herbs, brassicas, onions, and leafy greens that I can get started. And some herbs and flowers can even be direct sown outdoors in late winter, depending on the weather. I might even be able to sow peas directly in the garden.
Add Compost To Garden Beds
I meant to do this at the end of last season but didn’t get to it. So I’d like to add some compost to the garden beds as soon as the snow melts. That way it has plenty of time to settle in before I start putting my plants out.
January always feels like the longest month of the year. So I’m looking forward to surviving the last weeks of winter by getting a head start on my garden for the season.
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