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Spring is when gardeners really get things going, and the change from winter (when gardens are ‘sleeping’) to the time for spring planting is the most important time for getting ready. What a gardener does in the weeks between the final really cold weather and when they first start planting will decide if the growing season gets off to a good start, or has to deal with difficulties that could have been avoided. Gardeners who’ve been doing this for a while have a set way of preparing in spring, dealing with the health of the soil, making sure supports and things are in good shape, and being prepared to plant, all in an order that makes sense. They do the essential, groundwork type stuff before they get to the more fun part of actually getting seeds and plants into the soil.

1. Assess Winter Damage to Beds and Structures

Go all over your garden before you start digging in the dirt and look for anything winter has broken. The sides of raised beds might be curved, cracked, or out of place. Climbers and anything holding plants up could be wobbly because of things freezing and thawing. Water pipes might be split by ice getting bigger inside them, and fences could have been damaged by lots of snow or branches falling on them. Getting these sorts of structure problems fixed first means everything will be strong enough to hold your plants all season long.

2. Remove Winter Debris and Dead Plant Material

Get rid of all the dead plant stems, branches that have fallen, and anything else messy that’s left from last year’s garden or that built up during the winter. You can compost some of this garden waste, but if plants were sick at any point last year, you should put that material in a bag and remove it completely from your yard. Lots of what makes plants ill can live through the winter in dead plant bits and will get your new plants sick again if you use compost made with it.

3. Test the Soil

Spring is the perfect time to get your garden soil tested if it hasn’t been done in two or three years. You’ll usually have the results back in two to three weeks, and they’ll tell you exactly how acid or alkaline the soil is (the pH) and what nutrients it contains, so you can decide what to add to the soil or what fertilizer to use for the season ahead. In fact, even if you did test it not long ago, it’s a good idea to do a fast pH test yourself using a cheap probe or kit, especially if your water for watering or how often you use fertilizer could easily change the pH in certain spots.

 

4. Add Compost and Organic Amendments

Each spring, the very best thing a gardener can do for their soil is to put a layer of completed compost one or two inches deep over the garden beds. This compost provides nourishment, makes the soil itself hold together better, helps sandy soil keep water, improves how well heavy clay soil drains, and gives food to the tiny life in the soil that keeps plant roots healthy. You don’t have to dig the compost in. It’s great to just leave it on top and let the rain and the creatures in the earth work it down, and doing it this way won’t ruin the soil’s existing form.

5. Address pH Issues Based on Test Results

When your soil test shows your soil is too acidic or alkaline for what you want to grow, you should add something to fix it in the spring. Lime makes acidic soil’s pH go up, and elemental sulfur brings down the pH of alkaline soil. Because these things are slow to change the pH, taking effect over weeks or months, getting them onto the soil as soon as spring starts means they’ll have as much time as possible to do their work before you plant the plants that need the best conditions. And be sure to use the exact product and amount the soil test says to; changing the pH too much is just as damaging as not changing it at all.

6. Check and Repair Irrigation Systems

Get all the water flowing through your irrigation lines before you start planting, and look for any leaks or blockages. Swap out any broken parts like the things that actually drop the water (emitters) or the plastic piping. Also, make sure water comes out of everything at the same rate. A drip system which has a drop in water pressure from a sneaky leak or a blocked emitter will cause some parts of the garden to be constantly too dry, and you’ll only know this has happened once your plants are already struggling. If you run the system and watch each bit of it for fifteen to twenty minutes, you’ll find nearly all the problems before your plants are harmed.

7. Edge Beds and Define Pathways

When you have a clear, distinct line between your garden beds and the paths, grass and weeds are much less likely to grow where you’re actually growing things. This means you won’t have to do as much weeding all year. Plus, a tidy garden looks much more ordered. Using a sharp spade to make a clean edge around the sides of the beds only takes a few minutes for each one and is something in the spring that instantly makes the garden look loved, even with nothing in the ground yet.

8. Plan Crop Rotation

If you plant things from the same family of plants in the exact same spot in your garden every year, you’ll use up particular goodies in the soil, soil-living diseases will get stronger, and the pests that bother those plants will keep coming back. Now is the time during springtime to look at where you planted things last year (or try to remember!) and make sure to move the main plant families – tomatoes and peppers (that’s Solanaceae), squash and cucumbers (Cucurbitaceae), beans and peas (Fabaceae) and all the cabbage family – to different sections of the garden, and do this every three or four years. Rotating your crops in even a pretty basic way will lower how much trouble you have with diseases and will help your soil have a better balance of everything it needs.

 

9. Pre-Warm Soil for Early Planting

If you’re keen to get tomatoes, peppers, and other plants that like heat into the ground before you normally would, you can warm up the garden soil beforehand using black plastic mulch or clear plastic sheeting. Put the plastic over the surface of the planting area a fortnight before you plan to plant and it will hold onto the sun’s heat, increasing the soil temperature by five to ten degrees Fahrenheit. That’s a big enough increase to make planting early a good idea. You don’t have to do this, of course, but it’s a really good thing to do in areas where the season to grow things is short.

10. Sow Cool-Season Crops Immediately

You have to wait for the weather to be properly warm for things like tomatoes and peppers. However, you can plant peas, lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, beets, kale directly in the ground as soon as you can actually use the soil, and it’s soft all the way down to where you’ll be putting the seeds. If you get these in the earth during the very first week you’re readying your spring garden, you benefit from the cool, damp weather they like and get something to eat from the garden weeks before the bulk of your summer vegetables start to be ready.

Key Takeaway

Getting a spring garden going has a sensible order. First look at and fix any things like raised beds or fences. After that, deal with the soil: get it tested and mix in compost to improve it. Also, get your watering system sorted, decide what you’ll plant where, and then get cold-loving plants into the soil right away. Doing all of this before it’s hectic with planting summer vegetables means the garden will be in good shape physically, have the nutrients it needs, and be well organised for when it will grow best.

How a gardener acts, or doesn’t act, in the weeks after the last of the crops are gathered and before a really strong frost hits will directly determine how well the garden will grow next spring. Winterizing a vegetable garden isn’t just about getting rid of dead plants then leaving it; if you do it completely, you’ll look after the way the soil is put together, lower the number of weeds and bugs for the following year, stop the soil being blown or washed away, and set up the garden to come out of winter in much better condition than it went in. You won’t need to spend long on it, a lot of gardens can be fully prepared for winter in a single weekend, and the benefits of doing so will build up over every season after that.

1. Remove Spent Crops and Diseased Plant Material

Once your yearly vegetables have stopped giving you food, get rid of them entirely, either by pulling them up or cutting them off at the ground and digging up the roots if you can. If plants had illnesses this year (like blight on tomatoes, powdery mildew on squash or bacterial wilt on cucumbers), put them in bags and send them to the town’s compost place, don’t add them to your compost at home. The stuff that causes those diseases will survive the winter in the old plants and will get your new plants sick again if you leave the rubbish in or around the garden.

2. Add a Final Layer of Compost

If you put a one or two inch layer of fully broken-down compost on the surface of garden beds after you’ve harvested everything for the winter, it’ll slowly feed the soil. By springtime, some of it will have mixed in with the earth. Throughout the winter, the repeated freezing and thawing, the rain, and all the life in the soil will all push the compost down into the soil, so you won’t have to dig it in. Plus, that compost layer gives a bit of warmth to the whole community of living things in your soil, keeping them from being damaged by very cold or very warm temperatures.

 

3. Plant a Cover Crop or Apply Heavy Mulch

When soil is left bare during the winter and gets rained on, blown around by wind, and repeatedly frozen and thawed, it washes away, gets packed down, and loses all the good stuff that makes it healthy. We can mainly protect soil throughout the winter in two ways: planting a cover crop or using mulch. A cover crop is something like winter rye, crimson clover, or hairy vetch that you plant in the early or middle of autumn, and its roots keep the soil from moving. It also stops winter weeds from growing and, when you chop it down in the spring, becomes part of the soil itself, improving it. If you’d rather do something easier, a substantial mulch layer – four to six inches of straw, broken up leaves, or wood chips – will do a similar job of preventing erosion. But this doesn’t involve buying seeds or doing anything to a growing plant in the spring.

4. Protect Perennial Crops

In areas where it gets really cold, repeatedly going below the lowest temperature a plant can tolerate, things that come back year after year like asparagus, rhubarb and strawberries, thyme, oregano, rosemary (though rosemary is a bit iffy depending on how cold it gets), and fruit trees all do better if you give them some winter help. Once the ground is frozen, put a layer of straw or broken up leaves four to six inches deep over the roots. Don’t do it before the freeze though! If you put it on too early, the ground stays warmer, and your plants might think spring has arrived and start to wake up, and that’s bad. That covering of material protects the roots from the most severe cold and also stops the ground from repeatedly freezing and thawing. This freeze/thaw process can lift plants with roots that don’t go very deep, and push them right out of the soil.

5. Clean and Store Tools and Equipment

If you leave garden tools outside all winter, they’ll get rusty, won’t be as sharp, and will generally fall apart a lot quicker than tools you’ve looked after with cleaning and proper storage. Wash all your hand tools, get them dry, and then give them a thin covering of oil – linseed oil is best for wooden handles, and machine oil for the metal parts. When temperatures drop below freezing, you absolutely have to drain your drip irrigation system; otherwise, the water inside the pipes and connections will turn to ice and break them. Disconnect the garden hose from the tap outside, drain the water from it, roll it up, and keep it inside. Finally, before putting power tools away, give them a once over and do any maintenance the manufacturer says to do at the end of the season.

6. Plant Garlic and Spring Bulbs

For garlic and bulbs that bloom in spring (tulips, daffodils, crocuses, alliums) the best time to put them in the ground is after the first light frost, but before the ground is completely frozen. They absolutely need a cold rest to grow as they should, and planting in autumn lets their roots get a grip before the earth gets too hard. Garlic set in November and with a nice thick layer of mulch will pop up by itself next spring and grow into proper sized bulbs by midsummer, needing almost no care at all during the winter.

 

7. Evaluate the Season and Plan Improvements

It’s much better to write down what happened during the garden’s growing time while you still remember it. Specifically, what grew well, what didn’t, and how you should do things differently next year will give you a plan for the future, and it will be way more useful than trying to remember all the details after several months. Think about which kinds of plants did the best, in which area were there bugs, and where you needed to change the water system. And all of these things you’ve seen, whether you jot them in a garden notebook, an app on your phone, or a simple chart, will help you make more sensible choices for the next growing season and stop you from making the same mistakes again.

8. Order Seeds Early

The more unusual and sought-after kinds of seeds from special companies disappear quickly as the season begins, and this is even more true after years when lots of people have suddenly taken up gardening at home. If you want to be sure to get the types of seeds you want, and have them delivered to you by late winter so you can start them inside, you should order in late fall or early winter, long before everyone starts ordering in January. Plus, a lot of seed companies give you a better price if you order early, so autumn is the cheapest time to get seeds for next year.

Key Takeaway

To get your vegetable garden ready for winter, do these things in order: get rid of plants that are finished or have illnesses, incorporate compost into the garden, then cover the soil with either cover crops or a layer of mulch. You should also protect any plants that will last through the winter, and clean and put away all your tools. At this time, you can plant garlic and bulbs for spring, write down what happened in the garden this year, and importantly, get next year’s seeds ordered with plenty of time to spare. Spending just a weekend on all of this will look after the soil, mean you have less to do in the spring, stop the winter weather from washing the soil away, and help your garden begin the next growing season in a much better condition.

Lots of people with gardens think the season for growing is over when summer is done, but actually, some of the yummiest and best vegetables are grown in the cool, shorter days of autumn, not the hottest part of summer. If you plant another set of crops in July or August, you can use the milder fall weather to grow vegetables that like being cool and in fact taste better if they get to mature when it’s cold. In fact, a little frost will make some of them even sweeter; the cold makes the plant change starches into sugars, and the plant uses these sugars as a natural way to protect itself from freezing. So, to make sure these vegetables are ready to harvest before winter, you have to plan when to plant them, counting back from when you think the first frost will be.

1. Kale

Kale is probably the very best vegetable you can grow in your fall garden. The leaves get quite a bit sweeter once they’ve been frosted, plus kale can handle temperatures far below freezing; lots of types will live through 10°F or even colder without needing to be covered. If you plant seeds in late July or early August (that’s ten to twelve weeks before your first frost is predicted to come) you’ll get nice strong plants. These will give you fresh kale from October to January in many areas. And kale is special because it’s one of the few vegetables you can keep harvesting all through the winter. You just grab the outer leaves when you want them, and the plant keeps on putting on new growth from the middle.

2. Spinach

As fall brings cooler weather and days get shorter, spinach does really well, giving you much nicer, delicate and sweet leaves. Spring spinach, which is pushed by the heat and quickly goes to seed, just doesn’t compare. If you put seeds in the ground six to eight weeks before your first frost, they sprout easily in the late summer soil (which is still warm) and you’ll have spinach you can pick in 30 to 45 days. And in places that don’t get incredibly cold, spinach can survive the winter with a small covering of straw, giving you a harvest in early spring…long before you’d get anything from spinach seeds planted at springtime.

 

3. Lettuce and Salad Greens

Lettuce that grows in the autumn doesn’t get bitter and go to seed as quickly as lettuce planted in spring. This is because as days get shorter and it gets colder, the plant understands it should just keep making leaves instead of starting to flower. You’ll have a steady amount of lettuce for salads from early August to November if you plant seeds directly in the ground every two weeks. And, a simple covering over the rows or a cold frame will actually make the harvest last even longer, frequently all the way into December in zones six and seven.

4. Radishes

Radishes are the quickest fall vegetables to harvest, being ready just 25 to 30 days after you plant the seeds, and you can get them in the ground as late as four or five weeks before the first really cold weather. Fall radishes get a lovely crunch and are milder to eat than those grown in spring. This is because the cooler dirt they grow in makes them grow a bit slower, and all parts of them become good at the same rate. Daikon and watermelon radishes, which are for winter, need much longer to grow (60 to 70 days) so you’ll need to plant them in the middle of summer to be sure they get to a full size before the earth freezes.

5. Carrots

Carrots put in the ground in the middle or later part of summer, to be dug up in the fall, generally have a nicer taste and are sweeter than those grown in spring. When the earth gets cooler in autumn, the carrot roots change the starch they’ve kept inside into sugars. This makes them naturally sweeter and the first frost actually makes that sweetness much stronger. They can easily stay in the ground for a long time after it has frozen, the soil around the roots keeps them safe, and you can just pull them up whenever you need to during fall and into the early part of winter before the ground becomes totally frozen. A generous layer of mulch over the carrot bed will help them stay in the ground for longer because it stops the soil from getting too cold.

6. Beets

Beets, much as with carrots, get noticeably sweeter as they grow in cooler weather. If you plant the seeds ten to twelve weeks before the first frost is predicted, the beets will be ready to pull from the ground just as the weather is starting to get cold and make the sugar build up inside them. You can eat both the beetroot itself and the leaves, so you get two harvests from just one sowing. For salads, use beet leaves when they are small and soft, but the older ones are really good fried.

7. Broccoli

Broccoli grown in the autumn usually makes better, more solid heads of broccoli than spring broccoli. This is because the heads develop in the lovely cool temperatures of fall and don’t get what’s called ‘bolting’ – which is when they flower too early and spoil the crop. If you put broccoli plants in the ground in the middle to the end of summer, about 85 to 100 days before you’re expecting the first frost, then the heads will be forming when it’s ideally cold. And, once you’ve cut off the main head, many types of broccoli will then give you lots of smaller stems to enjoy for many weeks after.

 

8. Turnips

Turnips are fast-growing, with most kinds ready to harvest in between 45 and 60 days, and they can withstand a good freeze without harming the root or the leaves. If you plant turnip seeds in late July or August, the roots will get bigger as the weather cools in September and October. And just like beets, you get two crops from turnips. You can roast, mash, or put the roots in soup, while the leaves are good for you and tasty, whether you cook them or use them fresh in salads.

9. Peas (Fall Crop)

We usually think of putting peas in the ground in spring, but if you plant them about 8 to 10 weeks before your first frost, you’ll likely get a harvest just as good, or even better. This is because the plants don’t have to deal with powdery mildew, which is a problem when it’s warm and damp late in spring. Peas for fall develop in the cool, dry weather they really like, and their pods will be nice and crisp and sweet. You can use the very same types of peas you’d plant in spring, plus, their roots add useful goodness to the soil for the next thing you plant in that space next springtime.

Key Takeaway

If you plant kale, spinach, lettuce, radishes, carrots, beets, broccoli, turnips, or peas quite late in the summer, you’ll get a fall crop of them which is usually better tasting and in better condition than what you get in spring. The cold weather makes root vegetables sweeter, stops leafy greens from going to seed, and overall, there are fewer bugs and illnesses for everything to deal with. You need to figure out when the first frost is likely to arrive, and from that date, work out the last possible day to plant each thing. Then, sometime between July and the beginning of September, you can put the seeds in the ground or set out plants.

Why a garden gives you food for four months, but another for six, is often all because of one cheap thing: a floating row cover. This is that light, see-through material (people also call it frost cloth or garden fabric) and it makes a protected, small climate right above your garden. This protects your plants from frost, wind, and how cold it gets at night. In fact, agricultural scientists have shown row covers can get your growing started three or four weeks earlier and finished two or three weeks later. That means you can get up to six more weeks of food, without a heated greenhouse, electricity or anything complicated.

How Row Covers Protect Plants

Row covers protect plants in two ways: they provide warmth and shelter from the wind. The material holds a layer of warmer air around the plants as if it were a light blanket. This warmer air stops temperatures from changing so suddenly and keeps the plants between two and eight degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the air around them, depending on how thick the covering is. At the same time, the covering itself stops the wind from hitting the plants, and this is important because wind makes frost much more damaging. Thick row covers (one and a half to two ounces per square yard) give you the best protection from frost, generally down to 24 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Thinner ones (half an ounce to one ounce) don’t warm things up as much but let more light and air through, so you can use them to keep bugs off plants during the growing season.

 

Setting Up Row Covers Correctly

For things that don’t grow very high, like lettuce, spinach, carrots, you can simply lay row covers on top of them. Because the material is very light, it sits on the plants instead of squashing them and as the plants get bigger, they actually push the cover up. If you are growing taller plants or want to leave the cover on for quite a while, you can make basic tunnels. These are made by pushing flexible PVC piping, thick wire, or curved metal tubing into the ground about two or three feet apart; the fabric then goes over this frame, keeping it above the tops of the plants. To stop the wind from getting under the edges of the fabric and letting the cold in, you need to weigh them down with stones, planks, landscaping pins or just bury the edges in dirt. Don’t pull the fabric tight, and leave it fairly loose; this gives the plants space to grow and also stops them from being rubbed and damaged in the wind.

Spring Application: Planting Earlier Than the Last Frost

People most often use row covers to shield tomato, pepper, squash, cucumber plants and others that like heat when they’re first planted, usually about two or three weeks before the final frost in spring. You leave the covers on until the temperature doesn’t go below 50°F at night. Once that happens, they need to come off so bees, butterflies, and all the other creatures that pollinate flowers can get to them; row covers keep pollinators away from blooms, and plants needing insects for pollination won’t get fruit if the covers are still over the flowers. If you plant cold-loving crops under row covers in late winter you can get them in the ground four to six weeks prior to that last frost, and you’ll be harvesting them weeks earlier than if they weren’t covered.

Fall Application: Harvesting After the First Frost

When autumn arrives, you can keep your cold-weather plants going for a long time after a frost would normally end their growth with row covers. Kale, spinach, lettuce, carrots, beets, all benefitting from being under these covers in October and November, will often give you produce all the way to Thanksgiving and even past it in many areas. You put the covers on before you’re expecting the first frost and you leave them on until you’re completely done with the garden for the winter. Since fall crops aren’t making flowers, you don’t have to worry about bees and other pollinators getting to them, so you can leave the covers on all the time. This is different to how you use them in spring, when you sometimes have to take them off every day to allow for pollination.

Dual Use: Pest Protection During the Growing Season

During the summer when things are growing, light row covers do more than just protect from cold; they also keep pests off your plants. If you put row cover material over brassicas (that’s cabbage, broccoli, kale) you’ll stop cabbage moths from putting their eggs on the plants and therefore won’t get cabbage worms. You won’t need to use any sprays to get rid of them! And, covering your squash from the time you plant them until they start to flower stops squash vine borers from getting into the stems. For keeping pests out, use the very lightest row cover you can find (0.5 ounces per square yard) to avoid the plants getting too hot in warm weather.

 

Key Takeaway

You can get three or four extra weeks of growing in the spring and two or three in the fall from using row covers, meaning a total of up to six weeks of being able to harvest things from your garden and they’re fairly cheap costing between ten and thirty dollars for each bed. Thick material will safeguard plants if temperatures get down to 24 or 28 degrees Fahrenheit, and thinner material can be used in summer to keep bugs off your plants. For plants needing bees or other insects to make fruits and seeds, you’ll have to take the cover off when they start to flower so the insects can reach them. If plants will be quite tall, a basic frame of wire or plastic tubing (PVC) will hold up the covering, but for things that stay low to the ground you can put the cover directly on top of them.

Lots of home gardeners, from late June to early August (when plants are really growing!) get into a rhythm of just getting by with watering, weeding, and picking what’s ready, but they don’t do a lot of important things that will make a big difference to how much and how good your vegetables are in the autumn. Experts in gardening from the University say these weeks in midsummer are in fact the most important time of the whole year for planning and putting new things in the ground. Despite that, most of us think of them as a relaxed time between the busy spring planting and getting everything cleared up in the fall. If you do the things people usually forget about at this midsummer time, you’ll find your garden is much more fruitful overall.

1. Succession Planting Fast-Maturing Crops

By the middle of summer, the lettuce, radishes, bush beans and anything similar that grows to maturity quickly will have been picked or are just about done providing a crop. A lot of gardeners then just leave those spots in the garden bare for the rest of the season. But if you quickly plant fresh seeds of the same things in those beds, or switch to things that do well in fall, you’ll have something growing all the time. You can get a harvest of lettuce, radishes, cilantro, bush beans from seeds planted in July, and they’ll be ready to eat comfortably before the first frost arrives.

2. Sowing Fall and Winter Crops

Most people think of planting things in spring, so a lot of gardeners don’t realize July and the beginning of August is when you should plant broccoli, cabbage, kale, carrots, beets, turnips, and other vegetables you’ll get from the garden in the fall. If you begin seeds for these in the middle of summer, either directly in the garden bed or in containers to put out in August, the warm ground will help them sprout quickly and they’ll be ready to be harvested when it gets nice and cool – which is what they like. If you don’t plant during this July/August period, you won’t be able to catch up later and you’ll not have anything to harvest in the fall.

 

3. Refreshing Mulch That Has Decomposed

By the middle of summer, that mulch you put down in spring usually breaks down, gets washed away by watering, or blows around with the wind, and so it becomes much thinner. If your mulch is less than two inches thick, it won’t do a good enough job of stopping weeds and holding water in the hottest, driest part of the year. That’s when you really need it to do those things! Putting down another two or three inches of straw, broken-up leaves, or any other natural mulch during the summer will rebuild that protective layer and help your garden finish growing strongly.

4. Side-Dressing Heavy Feeders With Fertilizer

By the middle of summer, plants that grow for a long time, like tomatoes, peppers, squash and corn, use up all the goodness in the soil around their roots. Because of this they really need extra food at this stage, and this extra feed is termed a ‘side-dressing’. You give them a boost by spreading compost, well broken down manure or a natural granular fertilizer in a circle around each plant, but don’t let it actually touch the stem. This will keep them growing strongly and making lots of fruit for the rest of the season. If you don’t do this, many of these plants that are hungry for food will by late August show you they are running out of nutrients. You’ll see this in leaves that are a paler colour, slower growth and smaller fruit.

5. Pruning Indeterminate Tomatoes

Tomato plants that don’t have a set size just keep growing and by the middle of summer they can be huge, leafy things. They can even shade the tomatoes themselves, stop air flowing around them, and start using loads of energy for leaves and stems rather than actually making fruit. If you get rid of ‘suckers’ – those little shoots growing in the place where the main stem and a branch meet – and only do this on the ones below the first flowers, the plant will focus on a smaller number of tomatoes which will be bigger and better. Also, taking off lower leaves that are on the soil will lessen the chance of soil diseases like early blight being flung up onto the plants with water splashes. You should do this pruning all through the growing season, but it’s particularly important when the plants are really speeding into growth in midsummer.

6. Monitoring for Late-Season Pest Buildup

By the middle of summer, pest numbers will frequently surge, because warmer weather speeds up how quickly bugs breed. Aphids, spider mites, hornworms, squash bugs, all fairly limited in June, can be causing serious trouble by August unless you’re looking for them and dealing with them. Looking at your plants every week, and specifically the underparts of leaves, plus where stems meet the plant, helps you find small problems while they’re still easy to fix without chemicals: you can pick them off, spray them with water, or use insecticidal soap on just the pests. If you wait until you can see the damage from a distance, the problem has generally gotten too big for a quick fix to handle.

 

Key Takeaway

Midsummer isn’t a time to relax in the garden. It’s actually when you really need to get things done; this is the best time for planting things for the fall, putting in autumn seeds, replacing mulch that’s broken down, giving lots of food to plants which are giving you a big harvest, trimming tomato plants which keep growing and growing, and dealing with bugs before they do a lot of harm. Gardeners who work at July and August as hard as they do in April and May almost always get a bigger harvest, have fewer issues later in the year, and have a strong, productive garden going into autumn instead of one that is worn out.

Watering is often thought of as the easiest part of looking after houseplants, and it is at its core. However, more houseplants die from being watered wrongly than from anything else you could do to them. It isn’t that people don’t try; in fact, most of us water our plants often and with good intentions. The issue is “often” for many of us boils down to a set routine, and plants don’t use water in a way that fits a schedule. How much water a plant needs shifts all the time, depending on how much light it gets, the temperature, how humid it is, the size of the pot, the soil it’s in, the time of year, and how much the plant is growing. You really have to go by how the soil feels to water a plant successfully, rather than by what day it is.

Why Calendar-Based Watering Fails

During the middle of summer, a houseplant in a sunny south facing window can dry out its soil in just two days. That same plant in the same pot, but during the brief, dark days of December, will take a whole ten days to use up an equal amount of water. If you water both in summer and winter on a set schedule, like every Wednesday and Sunday, your plant will either get too much water all winter, or not enough in the summer, and perhaps a bit of both depending on the time of year. The biggest reason water needs change with the seasons is how strongly, and for how long, the sun shines. However, the temperature of the room, how much moisture is in the air (which falls a lot when houses are heated during the winter), and how the plant is growing all add to why a regular watering timetable doesn’t work.

 

The Finger Test: The Most Reliable Method

To figure out when your houseplant needs water, and do it in a way that will pretty much always work, just use your finger. Stick your finger into the soil about an inch or two, as far as your first knuckle goes. If the soil at that depth is dry, your plant is thirsty. But if it is still wet, don’t water it, and this is true no matter how long it’s been! Plants that like to be kept pretty damp all the time (things like ferns, calatheas and peace lilies) should be watered once the top half inch of soil feels dry. However, for plants that can take dry spells (succulents, cacti, snake plants, ZZ plants), you should hold off on watering until the soil is dry almost all the way down to the bottom of the container. Using this one method regularly will save nearly all houseplants from being either overwatered or not watered enough.

How to Water Thoroughly When It Is Time

If poking your finger in the soil says the plant needs water, give it a good soaking, don’t just use a little. Water should go onto the soil slowly until you get water coming out of the holes at the bottom of the pot. This makes sure all the roots get wet, and not only the surface of the soil. Lots of people water lightly and often, but this only gets the upper soil moist, and leaves the roots deeper down permanently dry. Because of that, the roots will grow up instead of down, and the plant will be weaker, needing water all the time. Once you have soaked the plant, get rid of any water that has collected in the tray underneath it within half an hour. You don’t want the roots to be sitting in water.

Adjusting for Pot Type, Soil Mix, and Season

Because terra cotta pots have lots of tiny holes, water goes through the sides and the soil gets dry more quickly than in plastic or ceramic pots. This means plants in terra cotta need you to look at them for water more often. Potting mixes based on peat will hold onto water for a longer time than those with a lot of perlite or bark, but if they get completely dry, they can get to a stage where they push water away. This happens fairly often in winter because you’re not watering as much. If you water and the water just flows down the inside of the pot instead of sinking into the soil, the soil is too dry to absorb it, and you’ll need to get the whole pot and set it in a bowl or container of water for fifteen to thirty minutes. The water will soak up into the soil from the bottom. Most indoor plants don’t grow much in the winter, and as a result, you should water them less – and a quick feel of the soil (the ‘finger test’) will show you the soil stays damp for much longer between waterings.

 

Key Takeaway

The best way to know when your houseplants are thirsty is to stick your finger in the soil, down about one or two inches. Unlike just going by the calendar, this actually works, because plants need different amounts of water all the time depending on how much light they get, the temperature and how actively they are growing. And when they do require water, really give them a good soaking; water until it runs out of the holes at the bottom of the pot. You should get rid of any water in the tray the pot sits in after around half an hour. This way of checking and then soaking is what stops the two things that are most likely to kill a houseplant: consistently too much water, or too little that doesn’t get to all the roots.

Most houses don’t have walls of windows and tons of sunlight coming in. North facing apartments, rooms in the middle of a house, offices with those bright fluorescent lights, and hallways that are far from windows are places where the majority of houseplants will struggle. But a lot of lovely, simple to look after plants don’t just put up with being in the shade, they are happiest in it. These plants originally grew on the forest floor under thick leaves, where the sun hardly ever shone directly and they absolutely needed to get used to not much light to live. So if you’ve repeatedly failed to keep a plant alive in a darker room, these types of plants might finally be what you need for some green success.

1. Snake Plant (Sansevieria / Dracaena trifasciata)

You’d have to really try to kill a snake plant inside. They can put up with very little light, lots of light, not being watered often, or being forgotten about for a long time, and they won’t seem to mind at all. Their stiff, visually striking leaves make a room taller and more organized and they are available in a lot of different kinds: you can find very tall ones with dark green leaves, or much smaller, roundish types. NASA studies have shown snake plants are some of the best houseplants for cleaning the air. And generally, if you wait for the soil to be totally dry and water them every two or three weeks, they’ll do well, even if they aren’t in a super bright spot.

2. Pothos (Epipremnum aureum)

Many people suggest pothos if you have a dark room, because it will happily thrive where most houseplants would die – even in rooms lit only by fluorescent lights. Its long, cascading stems get quite long and are perfect for on shelves, in hanging baskets or if you want to guide them to grow along walls. There are lots of types of pothos, and they have different colored leaves: golden pothos is green and yellow, marble queen is green and white, and neon pothos is a bright yellow-green. If it’s extremely dark, the colorful sorts of pothos might go all green to get the most from the little light there is, but even then they are still doing well and looking good.

 

3. ZZ Plant (Zamioculcas zamiifolia)

ZZ plants have lovely, thick, waxy leaves that are a very dark green and they really do look as if they’re plastic – and they need about as much looking after. Because of their fat rhizomes, which are stems under the soil, ZZ plants hold onto water and can go for ages without needing a drink. They’ll happily exist in quite dim conditions that would be too much for most plants, plus you hardly ever get pests on them inside. Truly, the only way you will easily get a ZZ plant to die is by watering it too much, all the time, so they’re perfect for people who often don’t think about their houseplants for a long while.

4. Cast Iron Plant (Aspidistra elatior)

Because it’s amazingly hard to kill, the cast iron plant was very popular with people growing plants inside during the Victorian period and is still one of the strongest houseplants you can get. It bounces back from not much light, temperatures that go up and down, bad dirt, and forgetting to water it. The long, dark green leaves don’t grow quickly but stay good to look at all year; you don’t have to cut them, give them plant food, or do anything special. It does especially well in hallways, at the front door, and in other areas where almost nothing else will live.

5. Peace Lily (Spathiphyllum)

Peace lilies are a handful of flowering houseplants you can depend on to blossom even if they don’t get much light. Their lovely white flowers, which are actually specially formed leaves (called spathes) show up a couple of times a year without you needing to give them any extra sunshine. What’s more, peace lilies are great for people new to plants as they clearly show when they need a drink – they droop and then get their strength back within a few hours of being watered. This gives a nice, obvious signal to help you get a feel for how much water they like. They’re happiest in soil that is regularly moist, but not waterlogged, and they enjoy a little spray of water in dry rooms.

6-11: More Low-Light Champions

Lots of other plants do really well in low light, not just the top five. Chinese evergreens (Aglaonema) manage to show off colourful patterns on their leaves, even when the room isn’t very bright. Dracaena, especially the corn plant (Dracaena fragrans) and the dragon tree (Dracaena marginata) will give height and a tropical feel to darker spots. The parlour palm (Chamaedorea elegans) has lovely, soft, feathery fronds which will make a room more cheerful. You get a trailing style of growth, with heart-shaped leaves, from the heart-leaf philodendron (Philodendron hederaceum) and it’s similar to pothos. Spider plants (Chlorophytum comosum) will survive in dim conditions and create lots of hanging ‘babies’ you can use to start new plants. And the prayer plant (Maranta leuconeura) is pretty special as its leaves noticeably fold up at night, and it likes the sort of light you’d usually get inside a building.

 

Key Takeaway

You can still have lovely, healthy houseplants even if your place is dim. Plants like snake plants, pothos, ZZ plants, cast iron plants, peace lilies, Chinese evergreens, dracaenas, parlor palms, philodendrons, spider plants, and prayer plants originally grew on the forest floor, where they didn’t get a lot of sunshine. And because most of these are pretty good at handling not being watered regularly, they’re great for people who don’t have a ton of light or a very reliable schedule for watering. The most important thing for having success with indoor plants is choosing a plant for how much light you actually have in a room, instead of just assuming a sun-loving plant will be okay.

Lots of houseplant people get really worried about repotting. They’re afraid of hurting the roots, getting a pot that isn’t right, or accidentally making things go from bad to worse for their plant. Because of these fears, many wait until their plants are obviously doing poorly before they think about repotting. But actually repotting isn’t complicated and, if you do it the right way, can perk up a sad plant, supply it with new food, and allow the roots to have room to grow and support all the leaves and stems. Figuring out when a plant really needs a bigger pot (not all of them need this every year!) and using a method that doesn’t upset the roots too much and cause a big shock is what’s important.

Signs a Houseplant Needs Repotting

You don’t have to repot houseplants every year on a set date, in fact, a lot of types do better with a bit of a snug fit for their roots. You should repot because of what you can see happening with the plant, not just because a year has passed. Roots poking out of the bottom of the pot, or forming a clear spiral on top of the soil, are a pretty clear indication. If water flows right through the pot without the soil soaking it up, it’s likely the roots have filled so much of the space that there’s no soil left to hold the water. Slowed or much smaller new growth, even with plenty of light and food for the plant, means the roots have run out of room and food. And a plant that falls over a lot from being top heavy (lots of leaves and stems versus a smallish rootball in a small pot) definitely needs a bigger container. If you aren’t seeing any of those things, your plant is likely doing fine where it is and you shouldn’t bother it.

 

Choosing the Right Pot and Soil

When you get a new pot, it should only be an inch or two wider in diameter than the one your plant is in. It feels sensible to go for a much larger pot, thinking more space for the roots equals more growth, but a hugely oversized pot will hold a lot of soil and the roots won’t be able to use all the water in it for a long time. This leads to soil being too wet and causes root rot. Increasing the size a little bit lets the roots grow, but keeps a good balance between how much water there is and how many roots there are to drink it. The pot absolutely needs drainage holes. You can use a pretty pot without drainage as a cover (called a cachepot) if you put a plastic pot with drainage inside. And you will need new potting mix suited to your plant; for most houseplants a typical tropical mix is good, cacti and succulents need a cactus and succulent mix, and plants that grow on other plants (epiphytes) do best in orchid bark mix – this gives them the food and drainage they need.

The Repotting Process Step by Step

Water the plant well, one or two days before you’re going to put it into a new pot. Soil that has some moisture in it comes away from the roots more easily than dry soil, and a plant with plenty of water in it will bounce back from being moved to a new pot more quickly. To get the plant out of its current pot, hold the bottom of the plant with one hand and turn the pot upside down. Then, gently press or tap the sides of the pot to loosen the rootball. If the roots are wrapped very tightly in a circle at the bottom, gently use your (clean) fingers to pick at them and get them facing outwards. This will encourage the roots to grow into the new soil, instead of continuing to go in circles. Or, if the rootball is really crammed, make three or four cuts up the sides of the outside with a clean knife – this does the same thing.

Put a bit of new potting mix in the bottom of the new pot, just enough for the top of the rootball to be about half an inch below the pot’s edge so you have room to water. Get the plant in the middle of the new pot and fill in all around the rootball with the fresh mix. Use your fingers to gently press the soil around it, removing big bubbles of air but don’t overly squash the soil. The soil line on the stem should be at the same place as it was in the old pot. Putting the stem deeper down can cause it to rot, and letting the rootball sit too high will let roots dry out. Water the plant thoroughly right after you repot it and then put it where it usually goes. Hold off on fertilizer for two to four weeks. This gives the roots time to settle into their new soil before you start encouraging lots of new growth.

 

Key Takeaway

You shouldn’t repot just because it’s been a year. Instead, look for things telling you the plant needs it: roots growing out of the bottom, water going straight through when you water, or the plant just not growing very much. The pot you move it to should be just a little bit bigger, so one or two inches wider all around, and of course have holes in the bottom for water to get out. Use new soil that’s right for the plant. Carefully loosen roots that are circling around in the old pot, and when you plant it in the new one, keep it at the same height in the soil. Then give it a really good watering, and don’t feed it fertilizer for a couple to four weeks. That will help it settle in with as little upset as possible.

Pretty much any cook loves the thought of having fresh basil, parsley, cilantro, thyme, all right by the cooker. However, for lots of people who try to do this, they end up with long, thin plants that don’t give you much to use before they become sad, messy things that don’t add anything to your cooking. Almost always, the difference between those lovely pictures on Instagram and what you actually get is down to light. Most kitchen windowsills don’t give herbs the strength of light they need; they developed in the bright sunshine of Mediterranean, tropical and more typical climates and need that to grow thickly, with lots of the flavours and oils that are what you want for cooking.

The Light Problem and How to Solve It

To really thrive and give you a nice amount to cut for cooking, most culinary herbs require six to eight hours of sunshine each day. A window that faces south gets the most sun in the north half of the world, however, even the sunniest window only lets in a small amount of the brightness you’d get outside. Window glass blocks out the sun’s UV, window frames block light with their shadows, and the way light bounces around inside a room doesn’t equal the sun shining from all directions. Because of this, for almost all herb gardens indoors, extra light isn’t something you should think about having; it’s what will determine if you have herbs that give you a good yield or just look nice. A basic LED grow light bar, placed four to six inches over your herbs and on for twelve to fourteen hours a day, will give them the brightness they require to grow at a speed that means you can harvest them regularly for use in the kitchen.

 

Which Herbs Grow Best Indoors

Some herbs do better inside than others. For indoor pots, you want herbs that can manage with a bit less light, stay a nice shape and size, and will give you more of themselves after you cut them. Basil, parsley, cilantro, chives, mint, thyme are all pretty foolproof for growing herbs inside. Oregano and sage can be grown inside, but they get long and stretched out if they don’t get a lot of light. Rosemary is known for being tricky indoors, it needs lots of bright light, a good flow of air, and to be watered just right, and it’s really best outside, only coming in during the coldest weather. Dill and fennel will simply get too tall for almost any room and do best in the garden.

Container, Soil, and Watering Essentials

Herbs absolutely must have containers that drain well and have holes in the bottom. If they don’t, extra water will stay around the roots and cause root rot, which will rapidly kill your herbs. A regular plastic or terracotta pot of four to six inches across is a good size for each herb, or you can plant a bunch of herbs together in a long, trough-style planter. As for the soil, you want something light and that drains easily, and a normal potting mix with 20 to 30 percent perlite in it will give the roots the airy conditions they like. Most of the time, indoor herbs die from getting too much water. Let the soil get a little dry before you water, and check with your finger to be sure there isn’t already enough moisture in there.

Harvesting for Maximum Production

How you cut herbs really changes how much you get from them in the long run. The important thing is to snip from the top of each stem, right above where a leaf is attached. That makes the plant split at that point, giving you two stems for every one you had and in essence, doubling how much it could make each time you pick it. If you cut from the bottom or just pluck leaves, the main part that is growing stays as one tall shoot and just gets longer, instead of spreading out, and you end up with a long, spindly plant that doesn’t have many leaves. Pick often, but don’t take over a third of all the leaves on the plant at once, and it will remain neat, full and will go on producing for you.

 

Key Takeaway

Most windows just don’t give cooking herbs enough light, so to get a good harvest inside, you’ll need to add LED grow lights for 12 to 14 hours each day. Basil, parsley, cilantro, chives, mint, thyme are all herbs that do particularly well when grown indoors. What makes a thriving indoor herb garden, instead of the long and sparse plants many people get when they first try, is using pots that drain well and a nice, light soil, being careful about how much you water by sticking your finger in to check, and harvesting from the top down in a way that will make the plants bush out.

You can get houseplant tips all over the place – on social media, at the garden store, or from friends who mean well, but a lot of it isn’t true. Many common “rules” for houseplants are either so basic they trick you, come from old information, or are just incorrect. Experts in plant science and professional gardeners have explained these incorrect ideas many times, and yet they stick around. That’s because they seem to make sense and are easy to recall. Understanding what is true and false about plants allows you to look after them more successfully and not do things that will damage the plants you’re attempting to nurture.

1. Myth: Misting Houseplants Increases Humidity

Lots of people who grow tropical plants inside think that spraying them with water from a mister really boosts the humidity around them. However, this is a very common mistake in houseplant care. Studies of how humidity works inside show that the water from misting disappears in just a few minutes and gives a tiny, super quick bump in humidity, you really won’t even notice it. If you want to get humidity up for houseplants, you could bunch your plants together (all their leaves releasing water vapor will make a humid little area), put the pots on trays of stones and water (as the water disappears it will humidify the air right above the plants), or get an electric humidifier. Misting won’t hurt most plants, but it won’t be anything like the humidity you’d find in the tropics.

2. Myth: Ice Cubes Are a Good Way to Water Orchids

Lots of people suggest putting a few ice cubes on orchid bark and letting them melt to give the plant water, and the idea is to avoid giving it too much. Yet orchids are from the tropics, and shockingly cold water right on the roots can actually damage the root’s insides. A better method for watering is to pour water at normal room temperature all the way through the orchid’s soil (the “potting medium”) for fifteen to twenty seconds, then make sure all the excess water flows out. This way the roots get a good soaking but won’t be harmed by a sudden chill.

 

3. Myth: Yellow Leaves Always Mean Overwatering

Lots of people think yellowing leaves on indoor plants are because of giving them too much water, and that’s certainly what happens most of the time. However, a lack of light, leaves just getting old, plants not getting the food they need, temperatures that are too hot or too cold, or being crammed into a pot with too many roots are all things that will turn leaves yellow in different ways. So, instead of immediately thinking about the water and altering how much you give, you have to look at which leaves are turning yellow, how the yellowing is happening, and what the soil and light are like to figure out the problem.

4. Myth: All Houseplants Clean the Air

That famous NASA Clean Air Study from 1989 found some houseplants can get rid of volatile organic compounds (or VOCs) from air in completely closed rooms. But later studies have revealed that houseplants don’t really clean the air in a normal house or office, where air circulates, exchanges with outside air, and there’s a lot more of it. Drexel University scientists have worked out that you’d need hundreds of plants for every square foot of space to actually make a noticeable difference to air quality. Houseplants absolutely are good for you, providing beauty, lowering stress, and adding moisture to the air through transpiration. But thinking of them as air cleaners in a typical home is giving them far too much credit.

5. Myth: Putting Rocks in the Bottom of a Pot Improves Drainage

Lots of people have long put a layer of gravel or stones in the bottom of a plant pot before the soil, but surprisingly, studies by soil experts show this doesn’t help drainage – in fact, it makes it worse. When water moves through soil, it forms a “perched water table” where the soil and gravel meet. Basically, the soil will be entirely soaked before water even starts to go down into the gravel underneath, and your plant’s roots will be in heavier, more waterlogged soil than if the pot was filled only with potting mix and had drainage holes at the bottom. For good drainage, use a potting mix that drains easily, something with perlite or bark included, a pot with plenty of drainage holes, and absolutely don’t use a gravel layer.

 

6. Myth: Talking to Plants Makes Them Grow Better

It’s nice to imagine a plant parent having a heartening conversation with their ficus, but there isn’t much in the way of solid scientific proof that plants benefit directly from us talking to them. A few studies have seen plants that ‘hear’ sound waves grow a tiny bit more, yet this is because the actual shaking of the stems from the sound (much as a breeze does) somehow encourages them to grow, not because they understand what we say. Someone has also suggested the carbon dioxide we breathe out during talking might help, but we don’t release nearly enough of it in conversation for it to really make a difference to their growth. That said, talking to plants is good for us and therefore for them; people who chat to their plants are usually closer to them, spot when things are going wrong sooner, and generally give them a lot more care.

7. Myth: Succulents Need Very Little Water

Just because succulents can handle a lack of water doesn’t mean they can survive without it at all. Lots of people are told they “hardly ever need water”, and because of that, they don’t water them often enough. The plants then slowly, slowly dry out and die. This is a gradual thing, they don’t dramatically wilt; it can even take months. While they are growing (in spring and summer), most succulents will be happiest with a good soaking every one to two weeks, but only when the soil is bone dry. During the winter when they’re resting, a watering about once a month is generally enough. Importantly, the trick is to water infrequently, but when you do, to thoroughly saturate the soil and then to let it all dry out before you water again. It’s not about ignoring them as the idea of ‘almost never watering’ would have you believe.

8. Myth: Repot Houseplants Every Year

Lots of houseplants don’t need to be repotted every year, and in fact, doing so can even hurt them. Plants like snake plants, ZZ plants, peace lilies and a lot of succulents will flower more and develop nicely if their roots have filled the pot. Repotting too often disturbs the roots, gives them a new soil mix which holds water in a different way, and can really bother plants that like things to stay the same. You should only repot when you can see the plant needs it – if roots are poking out of the bottom, water goes straight through and doesn’t soak in, or it’s not getting much bigger – not just because it’s been a year.

Key Takeaway

Lots of frequent ideas about houseplants – things like the pointlessness of misting them, or the fact that putting stones in the bottom of a pot doesn’t help with drainage (and can even make it worse) – stick around because they seem to make sense and people keep saying them. Knowing what’s actually happening with plants and how they need to be looked after means you won’t waste time on things that don’t do anything (misting, watering with ice cubes, adding a layer of gravel) and you can use techniques that truly help your plants be stronger (using humidifiers or keeping plants together, watering with water that isn’t too cold or too hot, and a soil that water can flow through easily). Plants do best when they’re cared for correctly, not by following old stories.