The good news about winter in the Puget Sound area is that you can keep gardening. The ground doesn’t freeze as a rule, so this is a great time to plant or move woody plants and catch up on other chores.
For people who don’t enjoy yard work, the bad news is that you should keep gardening. Although there isn’t nearly as much to do this season, you can’t just put away the mower and ignore the garden for three or four months, as is done in much of the East and Midwest.
Luckily, the jobs can wait for a break in the weather. I usually bundle up in four or five layers, then shed clothing as I start burning calories. Let’s look at a few winter gardening opportunities.
Lawns
After Thanksgiving, I welcome anything that will help compensate for overeating. I make it a practice to do the last lawn fertilization then. Turf management specialists say that the late November or early December feeding is the most important one.
Put down one pound of nitrogen per 1000 square feet of lawn. Try to buy a fertilizer that has nutrients in a ratio of 3:1:2 or 6:1:4. The first number is the nitrogen. For example, if you bought a 20-pound bag of 18:3:10 fertilizer, it would contain (20 times18) divided by 100 or 3.6 pounds of nitrogen. That’s enough for 3,600 square feet of turf.
If you have trouble with the math, find a school kid who likes word problems to help. Alternatively, you can call the Snohomish County Extension master gardeners and let them figure it out for you.
Your lawn will get shaggy and probably will need trimming every four to five weeks. Avoid walking on the lawn in the mornings, if it is freezing. You can injure the grass and, because it grows slowly during very cold weather, your footprints will linger.
Make sure to avoid salting sidewalks or driveways where the runoff could hurt your lawn or plantings. There are several products on the market that will offer traction without harm to plants.
Flowers
Did you buy flower bulbs that are still sitting in bags in the garage? People do this all the time. It’s kind of like joining a health club and then never going to exercise. It’s a waste of money and definitely won’t produce the results that you want. If they haven’t dried out or become moldy, get bulbs in the ground this month. They may be a bit late but should still bloom.
If you haven’t done so already, dig up your dahlia tubers for storage. Clean up any other annuals or perennials that have died back and put the stalks into the compost pile. Collect support cages, hoops, stakes and trellises and put them in a shed or under the house eaves. They will last much longer, if you put them away each winter.
Vegetables
If you’re lucky your garden still has some winter vegetables and perhaps some leftover potatoes, carrots or beets nestled under a warm layer of mulch. If you have some bare soil, in your food garden or elsewhere, this is a good spot for those tree leaves that you are still raking. Run over them a time or two with your rotary mower to chop them up and they will be less likely to blow back onto the lawn.
Those spots without plants or mulch are probably covered with tiny seedlings of shotweed and other winter annuals. Pick a dry day and scuffle them up with a hoe. They are much easier to deal with now than waiting until spring when they will need to be hand pulled.
If you haven’t limed your vegetable garden in a couple of years, do it now. Sprinkle on about six pints of dolomite lime for every 100 square feet of planting bed. Cover it with a layer of organic matter and the earthworms will do the work of mixing it in for you.
Holly Kennell is a Washington State University master gardener and the former WSU horticulture extension agent for Snohomish County.
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