How to Prepare Your Flowers for Winter

Preparing for winter doesn't only involve lawn care and sprinkler preparations. If you want your yard to look gorgeous in the spring, you'll also need to prepare your flowerbeds for the coming winter weather. Nutri-Lawn Ottawa landscape services will help you cultivate your flowerbeds in order to protect them throughout the cold season. Though not all of your flowers will survive to see winter, you can help the survivors prepare for winter dormancy with your Ottawa lawn care. As with any good Ottawa lawn care practices, preparing your flowers takes a combination of Nutri-Lawn Ottawa landscape services and adjustments in your daily at-home routine. Here are tips from the pros at Nutri-Lawn Ottawa to help you find the perfect combination.

Clean up your flowers

Before anything else, make sure you clean up your flowers. Trim off the blackened stems and leaves from any perennial flowers that are in your garden. Remove any of the dead foliage from the plants themselves or from the ground. Dead stems that are still on the plants will sap the energy and nutrients from the living plants. If you don't remove the dead areas, your plants are at risk of diseases.

It's also important to remove the stems from perennials as well, as there may be fungi spores or insect eggs on the foliage.

Keep temperature balanced

To keep your plants from being damaged over the winter months, make sure to reapply mulch to your flowerbeds to balance out temperatures. You'll need a bit of a heavier layer if you want to protect your flowers in the cold season with Nutri-Lawn Ottawa landscape services. Organic mulch is best to use so that it can decompose during the Great Defrost in spring.

As mentioned, mulch maintains the temperature of the soil. You don't want the soil to get too hot – if it freezes, let it stay frozen. Heavy fluctuations in the temperature of your soil can damage the plants as well.

Decrease disease and weeds with compost

Active, warm piles of organic compost will help destroy disease pathogens and weed seeds in the soil. Throughout the summer months, you may have already started a compost pile with your Ottawa lawn care. Continue adding to this and mix it up regularly to prevent inactivity or stagnancy. It's also a good idea to sort through to discard any inactive or dubious organic matter.

Use evergreens to protect bulbs

The freezing, contracting ground can be tough on bulbs. If you want to stop the bulbs from being pressed to the surface, Nutri-Lawn Ottawa recommends laying down a bed of evergreen branches. The weight of the boughs will prevent both cracking and shifting in the soil.

Protect your trees

If you want to protect evergreens or new saplings, then a burlap screen will be your best friend. Wrap your screens around the trees to shield your plants from adverse weather or wind chill.

Prepare your flowerbeds effectively for winter with Nutri-Lawn Ottawa lawn care services. Receive a complimentary quote on Ottawa lawn care from Nutri-Lawn Ottawa today.