I have been gardening since I was little. Both of my parents and grandparents had massive gardens overflowing with zucchinis, tomatoes, and kale. And, while I wasn’t a fan of the long hours of watering or picking out rocks every spring, I learned a thing or two.

When I got my own place in 2022, it was only a matter of time before I’d start my own garden. My dreams of soft, rich soil—like what my parents had cultivated in their raised beds for the last 20 years—are quickly dashed. My house has a single strip of soil along half the length of the building. The plot is not raised and held together by rotting orchard poles. The poor soil quality was one of the first things I noticed. It was dry, chalky and, although technically brown, I swear it was ashen. Not a worm to be found.

I made it my mission to improve the soil quality. 

That first spring, I mulched with what I had on hand: two bags of thick cut wood chips and a single bag of compost. The tomatoes grew decently enough, but as soon as the days warmed in April, it was clear that the soil wasn’t holding moisture. In August, I would water twice a day so the garden wouldn’t die of thirst. 

In the fall, I left the bed bare and waited until the following spring to add layers of water-soaked newspaper, grass clippings, and several bags of compost. As a result, the soil was better this year, but I still had to add a bag of compost around my zucchinis. 

My goal was to reach a point of maintenance rather than construction, and it required a practice of not only waking the garden in spring, but also putting it to bed in the winter. 

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Dorothee Kieser has been a Master Gardener for the last 16 years, but it’s a lifelong passion of hers. “I was knee-high to a grasshopper [when I started]…I was always in the garden.”

She is recognized in the local gardening community as a leader and educator. Kieser recently received an award from The Master Gardeners Association of BC for her volunteer contributions and skills as a Master Gardener this October.     

Kieser emphasizes  the importance of taking care of the garden as winter approaches and tells me some of the practical steps any gardeners can take to ensure a healthy start to next spring. 

Putting the garden to bed for the winter is the process that begins after harvest. When the crops finish and die back, pull them out.

If you have a compost, put the vegetation waste there. Take any stakes out and store them for next year and pull out any lingering weeds. This is the point where many gardeners stop, but there’s still much to do. 

“You want to lime it this time of year; you want to cover it with some kind of mulch,” she says. “Leaves are wonderful. The reason you want to do that is to keep the good nutrients from leaching out … you don’t want the soil to be beaten down and compacted with the heavy rain.” 

The advice given for bigger gardens and farms is to use a cover crop over mulch. The goal is the same: to protect the soil while adding nutrients back into it over the winter. In smaller backyard gardens, mulch is often better. It becomes a consideration of space as cover crops will interfere with any early spring growth and harvests. 

Cover crops protect the soil with their roots, holding it together over the winter. Farmers till the cover crops to break up their root systems and release their nutrients into the soil. “With the nitrogen nodules and bacteria nodules on the roots, you get all the goodness plus the green compost tilled into the garden,” Kieser explains.

There are very divided opinions on till versus no-till methods of gardening. The till method is responsible on a large scale for the erosion of soil on commercial crops—in a backyard garden, however, if you’re still covering the soil, it won’t be damaging. 

It will naturally turn into the next layer of soil in the spring and doesn’t require any tilling. 

Linda Gilkenson, author and seasoned gardener based out of Salt Spring, advises to always mulch. In last year’s November issue of her gardening newsletter, Gilkenson writes that autumn leaves “are ideal for protecting roots of plants in the garden from cold injury. Since we want an insulating effect, the fluffier the mulch, the better, so don’t shred the leaves: even really big maple leaves can be used whole.” 

She goes on to recommend that if the mulch might blow away, secure it down with chicken wire until it has compacted after a few weeks. 

Leaf mulch is also an essential part in composting. The very basic version of this science is that leaf mulch is a balance of nitrogen (green matter) and carbon (brown matter). Leaves are one of the best ways to add brown matter to a compost pile. But if you don’t have a compost, hold onto those piles you raked up because they can be used on the bed in summer when those leaves are hard to come by. 

“Winter leaf mulches break down pretty quickly in the spring once earthworms, insects, and the myriad of soil microorganisms have re-awakened from their winter dormancy,” Gilkenson writes. “By summer, there is very little leaf material left to cool the soil and conserve soil moisture.” 

She describes practical steps for storing leaves so they won’t break down before you need them. Because let’s be honest, nobody likes a rotten bag of leaves.     

“The drier the leaves are, the better they will keep without decomposing … store them where they will be protected from rain, such as in a wire bin covered with a tarp or in closed leaf bags.” 

Mixing compost into the soil is best saved for spring since it will leach out with the winter rains, but there are some exceptions. “If you’re growing perennials, then compost is lovely to put around the roots and the remaining stubbles … that you’ve cut back,” Kieser says. “It gives them a winter blanket and feeds the roots during the winter months.” 

Manure is also better to use in the spring. It gives the soil a boost right before the plants go in and balances out anything lost over the winter. If soil quality is still poor in the spring, or it’s something you’re working on, manure is a great option to consider. 

The final step before the cold snap stays with us is the last bit of late winter planting. Garlic is best planted in October; planting may be as late as November, but no later than that. Sowing for early spring crops of spinach or similar plants can happen now.

“Sowing hardy varieties of lettuce, spinach, and other leafy greens so late in the fall that they don’t germinate until early spring has been working well for me for the last few years,” Gilkenson writes.

Kieser is also looking forward to the spring harvest and the fresh abundance of leafy greens:

“If I could grow nothing else, it would have to be lettuce and spinach.” 

Gardens don’t require a lot of space to produce a variety of crops. It’s all about how you approach it. 

“There’s no reason why your front yard has to be just grass. It can be all kinds of edibles … and you can interplant it with calendula or poppies or sunflowers,” Kieser says. “You can have an absolutely spectacular garden and still eat out of it, even in a very small space.”     

But if you have no space at all and do want to try your hand this spring, there are options for you. Now is the time to make connections. 

The Nanaimo Community Gardens Society runs two sites: Beban Learning Gardens and Pine Street Gardens. The community gardens are run by its members and they grow heirloom produce for sale, donations, and for members to take home. If you’re interested in getting your hands dirty, there’s always a job to be done. 

The Beban Learning Gardens is an organization that Kieser works with, but she said there are several other opportunities to get involved in Nanaimo.

“There are quite a few around Nanaimo. The Beban Urban Garden Society (BUGS), the Beban Learning Gardens, there’s the garden at Pine St., also run by the Nanaimo Community Garden Society. And quite a few others, Urban food forest at Beaufort,” she says.

My own garden is sleeping now. I took the tomato vines out the morning after the first frost and saved the last yellowing ones for my windowsill. I planted garlic last week—a first for me—and I might sow some spinach to look forward to in the spring.

Following my conversation with Dorothee, I was inspired and used a stack of old newspapers and grass clippings to tuck in the bed. It looks empty now without the green of summer, but it’s warm and all tucked in for winter.