Organic Gardening Tips For Maintenance

Hey, it’s Phil from SmilingGardener.om. I apologize in advance for the wind noise – I don’t have a wireless mic on today so i just have to use the camera mic.

I haven’t been making any videos this time of year because this is what my garden looks like under two feet of snow right now, but I wanted to share a couple of things with you today.

First is if you follow me on facebook and especially on youtube, you’re not really seeing anything from me this time of year, but if you come over to SmilingGardener.com, I am still writing an article every Saturday.

And if you want, you can sign up for my free ebook download and then you get on my email list and then I’ll actually send that out to you every Saturday. So I’m writing about how to improve your soil and control pests and how to grow nutrient-dense food and all of the same kind of stuff that I usually shoot videos about, and sharing tips for the upcoming growing season as soon as this melts.

And actually, I know some of you are gardening already if you live closer to the equator or by the ocean and so your weather is more moderated.

And I actually can see this because I sell organic fertilizers and microbial inoculants to gardeners in the U.S. and in January I starting getting orders from California and Texas and Florida and then gradually going into February and March, the orders come from further north and further east, so I can see when you’re starting to think about gardening.

If you are starting to think about fertilizers, I ship even during the winter because all of these products – even the microbial inoculants – it’s okay if they freeze for a little while. I get all of my stuff in in the winter as well from the manufacturers and it’s all good, so I’m shipping right now.

And you can go to SmilingGardener.com and click on ‘Organic Fertilizer Guide’ up in the main menu, and I sell products there but I also teach you how to make your own fertilizers, and it’s just a great comprehensive guide.

The main thing I wanted to ask of you today, because I am writing still right now and I’m going to be shooting more videos this year, and I’m always looking for more ideas for what to talk about – so I want to hear from you what is the one most important thing you want me to share this year on my website.

So let me know in the comments below, whether you’re on my blog right now or on facebook or on youtube, I will see that everywhere, and then I will have some ideas for what to create and then I’ll create it for you.

So that’s all for now. Talk to you soon.

H: Hey guys this is H, Phil’s sister from smilinggardener.com and today we are talking about preparing your garden for winter. How do we know it’s time to winterize our garden?

Phil: I do it right before it’s going to snow.

H: What’s the most important thing for preparing the garden?

Phil: For me it is like one really big step and that is doing something to protect your soil over winter. There are some few different ways you can go about doing that.

H: What’s the easiest thing to do?

Phil: Yeah. Like if I guess if we were talking about like a vegetable garden or a perennial garden, certainly one thing you could do is just leave your plants there, your tomatoes, your peppers, your everything, just leave them right there and they will just die back, the nutrients from the plant will go back into the root system of the plants and the top will just die back and become a mulch for the soil and all those nutrients and all those organic matter will makes its way back into the soil and it’s not the most esthetically pleasing, but if your garden is kind of back somewhere where it doesn’t matter and now it will be easiest way to do it and that’s how nature would do it too, right.

H: But what if your garden is in a really high profile area and you don’t want it to look that messy?

Phil:That’s what I have this garden here, its right up by the house and it’s like I try to keep it as a nice garden. So then what I do is take all of that stuff and put it into the compose bin because I really want to get the nutrients out of that and get the carbon, the organic matter out of that. So I take all that and put it into a compose bin and then I like to plan a carver crop.

H: What about leaves?

Phil: If you are not going to plan to carver crop, you want something to protect our soil and so that’s where mulch comes in and by far the best mulch and the most natural mulch is leaves and this is the time of year that we actually get them for free, especially if we have been clever enough to planting and make wild leaves.

H: I think that’s it. Is there anything else that you wanted to say about preparing the garden?

Phil: I did put a few more tips on the blog, so people are watching on YouTube, they can go over to this blog and there is some extra brownie points, there is some extra things you can do to really improve this process of soil building in the fall.

H: Sounds good.

Phil: Hey you know what I should say because you don’t know how to say it yet is for people who haven’t picked up the 15 vital lessons for becoming a better organic gardener, you can do that right on the Home page of smilinggardener.com and that’s where I teach a whole bunch of really cool tips.

H:You are gardening for the winter.