At the end of a production round or your season of outdoor growing, it’s time to clean up, get organized, and make sure that your space is prepared to offer the best conditions for the following crop cycle. While tidying up might not be the most inspiring chore, especially after all the hard work of growing an entire crop cycle, the benefits of maintaining cleanliness till the very end will pay for itself in the future.
Garden clean up where it really matters
When strolling through gardens you may notice that some growers choose to leave them a bit messy. Look a little closer and best advice suggests that these messes are confined to perennial, native plantings that evolved with their local geography. These plants tend to be well-adapted to the micro and macro-fauna of their region and are less vulnerable – not to mention that leftover seed heads provide food for birds and pollinators like native bees, moths, and butterflies overwinter in stems of plants like Joe-Pye weed or under piles of plant debris.
Specialty crops, on the other hand, tend to be tropical plants that were brought to their current locations. Over time, the pests and diseases that target these plants tend to spread and stay in the environment. Diseases like powdery mildew, verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, and mosaic viruses can all overwinter in the soil. Septoria leaf spot survives in plant debris from infected plants. For that reason, it’s especially important to clean out the garden after a frost or when you are done harvesting.
How to avoid future problems?
Be sure to destroy infested plants by burning, burying, hot composting, or sending plant materials to a centralized composting facility (i.e. out of your space!). Pay attention to your total garden space and rotate crops through different parts of your garden each year to avoid areas where infested debris (and thus spores of Septoria, etc.) may be present. As general guidance, be sure to maintain healthy airflow throughout the crops life cycle in order to prevent fungal diseases from establishing themselves.
As a special note regarding Septoria, some growers may feel doomed once they see this disease on their tomato plants and think their whole garden will succumb to the disease. Keep in mind that Septoria species each infects a specific host or group of hosts – so the leaf spot you see on one crop might not affect the other, but do still be cautious!
Pull up the covers
After removing plant debris, its best to keep the soil covered so that its rich nutrients and micro-ecosystem does not degrade from exposure to the wind, water, and sun. This can be achieved by putting down mulch or cover cropping. If you are just getting around to cover cropping now and live in a cold climate, you may still be able to seed winter rye, as it can germinate and grow at temperatures as low as 33F, just very slowly. Cereal rye also produces several compounds and releases root exudates that inhibit germination and growth of weed seeds. If conditions allow, add in a legume such as hairy vetch or crimson clover, in order to achieve the benefit of added nitrogen from the legume as it fixes atmospheric nitrogen into the plant itself.
Moving forward to the next season
While these suggestions provide general guidelines for maintaining disease-free conditions season after season, conditions do vary and questions always come up. Continue to take caution, stay organized, and do reach out with questions for your particular situation – CANNA is always happy to help.
