Putting the Garden to Bed, Wreaths, and Christmas Trees

The following has been provided by John and Katrina Bishop of Christopher’s Gardens Nursery in Lakeside

What should we be doing during the Fall with our plants? Stay on top of watering. It’s staying hot enough during the day, and the 40-degree mornings are becoming cooler. Water twice a week, a good deep soak for all the plants. In October, once a week.

Start putting the garden to bed once we get a hard frost. You can start prepping with mulch or manure to get ready for next year, typically around Halloween. After a good hard frost, you can rip the garden and put the amendments in for next year. Hopefully, we should have about a month more of the growing season.

Rose collars. Roses have that graft at the bottom of the rose. That’s the most important part of protecting the roses so they don’t freeze too hard. The Rose collar is a wrapping that goes around the bottom of the rose, and you insulate it with pine needles or oak or whatever to keep that graft warm.

If leaving for the winter, go ahead and put the garden to bed by adding mulch or manure and putting the amendments on top. You can stop watering. The rain and snow will sit on it and leach all the nutrients into the ground. Then, next year comes planting and tilling. If you are not leaving for the winter, you can wait until the first hard frost.

Tomatoes. Tomatoes are still green. They’re not going to ripen as fast because it’s not hot anymore. If you stop watering as much and start stressing them out, they’ll ripen faster. Especially if you have a ton of little tomatoes, they’re probably not going to get ripe and big by the time it freezes. The bigger ones that are close to being ripe — stop watering your plant frequently, and they’ll turn red faster.

Katrina states you don’t want tomatoes to reseed. With the Heirloom variety, you can harvest seeds for next year. Pull all tomatoes and tomatillos because they reseed and throw them away. They don’t break down and are not suitable for compost. If there’s a tomato seed in your compost and you use the compost later, a tomato plant can grow.

Rotate the garden. John says if you plant the same plants in the same spot year after year, they will suck all the nutrients out of that ground area. Once we get the hard frost, the tomatoes won’t come back, squash won’t come back. Just rip it out before you leave or now before it freezes.

When to cut everything back. Spring. Some plants, like perennials and daylilies, like to pull from the top during the Fall for the nutrients for the roots. They’re still green on top. After a hard frost, they’ll turn yellow. You want them to naturally die off, waiting until spring to trim. You shouldn’t have to cut anything back until Spring after the snow unless it’s to shape it.

Roses. The biggest misconception about cutting back is with roses. Here, you don’t have to cut your roses way back. They can be shaped. John suggests you let them go through the winter on their own, and next spring, just before they bud out, clean them up a little bit.

For shrubs, Katrina says it depends on which kind of shrub it is because there are shrubs that are old wood shrubs and new wood shrubs. If you cut back lilacs now in October, you’re cutting your blooms for next spring, and they won’t bloom. Same thing with old wood-colored hydrangeas. They have growth from right now they are putting on their blooms for next year if you’re cutting them back.

Trimming trees in the Spring is better when they are dormant. The leaves fall off. They still have sap in there. You have to wait until the sap comes out back to the roots.

There’s a handful of perennial vegetables that you want to leave in. Jerusalem artichokes — green glove or Jerusalem artichokes. One is a root. One is a top. Chives will come back along with thyme, parsley, and rosemary, if not too hard of a winter.

Insulation: Oak leaves and pine needles are good for insulation during the winter. They’re not suitable for amendment. They take a long time to break down.

For composting, use leafy trash. Cabbage leaves, cauliflower, and anything that has a big leaf can be put in the compost. The best compost is mulch, manure, or anything leafy if you don’t have compost. Stay away from pine needles. John states, “Everyone thinks we have really acidic soil from the pine needles, but it’s the opposite. We have real alkaline soil. It takes the pine needles so long to break down, and they don’t really help with much. They are great for mulching around roses and shrubs — they can still breathe but keep them warm for the winter. If you have a perennial flower, you can put down mulch or manure and then put down pine needles on top of that because it will still leech all winter long, and the pine needles will add another layer of protection. If you don’t put anything down, it will be okay unless we have a harsh winter with negative 15 or -20. It will damage perennials and roses. Putting a layer of mulch or manure on top adds a layer of protection for the roots. The snow helps well.”

We’re seeing a lot of fungus: powder mildew, blight from the cool nights now, and the little bit of rain we’ve had. You don’t want that sitting in the compost bin. It is better to get rid of it.

Potatoes — can harvest them any time, but once the plant starts to look dead on top, they are ready.

Grow lights. If you plant your seeds too soon and it stays cold through mid-May like last year, by the time you put them outside, they get lanky. Be careful not to grow too early so you can put it outside. Tomatoes take forever. Peppers take the longest — starting in January–February to plant in May. Squash is fast and can be seeded in the garden. When planted, they can take over with their big runners.

When we asked John what the best thing is that grows here, he said tomatoes are probably #1. Cherry and Heirloom. Heirloom, you won’t get as many because they get bigger. Half a dozen or ten big tomatoes, whereas cherry tomatoes are a bunch of little ones. Bell peppers are good, and jalapenos. The hardest are probably watermelons and cantaloupe, melons. There are shadier and cooler pine trees in the upper Pinetop area. In Show Low, St. John’s, or Snowflake, where it’s warmer, they grow great melons.

It’s warmer in Show Low and Snowflake, and those areas can begin growing some plants earlier in the Spring than if you are planting at the top of Pinetop, where it’s cooler. Can still get a frost on the first of June. A couple of days before and after the summer solstice, you can have a frost. This year, that was mid-June.

There is no need to fertilize because everything is going dormant. Grass can be fed right now to keep it going into the fall, but the biggest thing is the nonstop watering. If it’s dry and sunny outside in the dead of winter, still water grass. People have irrigation systems that you have to turn off and blow and winterize, so if you shut everything off and turn off the water and come back in May, there’s a chance that some of the trees will not do well and pruning beds won’t do as well. Usually, the first frost isn’t hard enough to damage pines. 30–32 isn’t going to freeze your system generally. After that, it’s time to blow the system out if you’re up here.

Fall is for watering, planting the bulbs, and putting the garden to bed. It’s easy. You can either start raking the pine needles and hauling them off or keep them for insulation. There’s not much to do.

Handmade Wreaths. Around Thanksgiving, Christopher’s has handmade wreaths they’ve made out of Douglas firs and different trees with a big red bow.

Christmas Trees. Usually, the weekend after Thanksgiving, Christopher’s gets Nordmann Fir and Douglas Fir cut trees fresh from Washington. Live trees and potted trees are for sale and can be planted. The tree can only be kept inside the house for five days max, John says, because it is too hot. Then, transition it to a garage or patio outside.

By February, the greenhouses are humming and planting veggies and things for springtime. Then there are brand new seed starting kits in the spring, fertilizer, and seed potatoes in March. The cycle goes on…

Christopher’s Gardens Nursery 1629 W. White Mountain Blvd / 744 W. Apache Lane Lakeside, AZ 85929 | 928-368-6723 christophersgardensnursery.com