Seasonal Garden Maintenance Checklist

Maintaining your garden requires a mix of regular tasks, such as watering, fertilizing, pruning, weed control, and cleaning. With a plan, these tasks become less daunting and easier to manage through the seasons.

Follow the Seasonal Garden Maintenance Checklist to keep your landscape healthy and vibrant throughout each of the seasons.

Spring

Just like your house, a garden needs to be cleaned up regularly. This can minimize weed invasions, pest damage, and disease. Part of this cleaning up is removing debris that has collected over winter, like dead leaves and rotting vegetables or flowers. These items can be added to the compost pile or used as mulch.

It’s important to check for signs of bee activity as you clean up the garden, like mud-plugged ends of stems, or chrysalises and cocoons on branches. If you find these, leave them for bees to hatch from later this year.

In early spring, plant warm season crops and perennials. Continue weekly lawn care, mowing and weeding, and add kitchen scraps to the compost pile. Water gardens and soil test for pH balance. Drain and store rain barrels + hoses. Turn off outdoor water spigots before freezing temperatures.

Summer

Keeping up with seasonal maintenance tasks keeps your garden thriving, while providing bountiful harvests throughout the year. Whether your garden is ornamental or vegetable, the following checklist provides an easy-to-follow guide to keeping your garden in top shape all summer long.

Keep up with regular grooming and cleaning tasks like weeding, deadheading annuals, pinching perennials, and picking fruit and vegetables. This prevents plants from becoming overgrown and less healthy, while also helping to control pest problems.

During summer, plant summer-blooming bulbs such as dahlias and gladiolus once the danger of frost has passed (check your local average last frost date). Soak lawns to encourage deep rooting; fertilize shrubs and trees as needed. Harvest herbs and veggies; snip and dry perennial flowers for winter use; pick fruit; and scout for signs of pests, such as holes, snouts, or torn or bitten leaves. Keep up with routine watering, aiming for about an inch each week. Also consider re-mulching.

Fall

In the fall, gardeners should re-mulch the soil, remove all vegetable plants and flowers that have gone to seed. It is also a good time to buy and order the seeds, bulbs and plants for the next growing season. It is important to clean up the vegetable garden thoroughly in the fall to prevent disease and fungal spores from overwintering.

Keeping the garden clear also helps to prevent pests overwintering. Insects like twig girdlers and plant pathogens overwinter in decaying leaves, stalks and debris. Raking up and disposing of this material is very helpful in reducing the insect problem in the spring.

Lastly, it is important to create brush piles in the garden corners to provide warmth and shelter for birds and small mammals throughout the winter. It is also a good idea to keep the bird feeders full with fatty, high energy foods for overwintering birds. This is a good time to prepare the fruit trees for pruning in the spring.

Winter

Keeping the garden healthy and beautiful in winter requires different gardening tasks. Plants grow much more slowly in winter, but many still need to be watered. In colder climates, mulching and creating coverings to shield plants from freezing temperatures and harsh winds can help prevent damage and promote growth.

Other gardening tasks include pruning deciduous trees and shrubs in the fall, as well as reseeding annuals, perennials, and garlic with seed from last year. This reduces weeds and saves you from having to dig up and dispose of them in the spring.

Debris from the garden is a good addition to a compost pile, as long as it’s not disease-ridden. Raking up fallen leaves, residual stalks and rotting fruit will also reduce insect pest populations that overwinter in this material. You should also clean and disinfect tools and other garden equipment before storing them away for winter. This also gives you a chance to inspect and repair garden structures for any maintenance issues before cold temperatures arrive.