So, Amy, would you cut back the strawberries and leave them mulched then? They look really bad right now. Except a couple of them are trying to make fruit.

Thanks for the article links.

Honestly, I don't know what to tell you about strawberries. The runners make new plants. Years ago, my dad had a strawberry bed, he mulched, but I don't know how much trimming he did. I had strawberries in a pot for 2 years, but it dried out this year and died. It over wintered in the green house. Not any special care. That is the extent of what I know.

I agree with Amy that you can help your carbons break down over the winter by adding nitrogen.Any nitrogen will work. It doesn't matter what kind you choose.

My favorite way to do this is to overseed the lawn with rye grass in the Sept/Oct time frame. The grass sprouts and grows and we have to cut it all winter, but that's a plus. We catch the clippings in the mower's grass catcher and dump them on top of the garden beds. Every now and then I will mow up a bunch of autumn leaves and add alternating layers of them with the rye grass clippings. By springtime, there is a beautiful layer of new compost on top of all the beds along with the residue of the previous year's mulch. I don't dig it into the soil. Instead I dig through it to plant. Over time, digging, insect activity, rain, etc. carry the nutrients and compost down into the soil. If you don't have access to rye grass clippings in the soil, use an organic soil amendment like anything made from alfalfa, alfalfa meal, etc. Scattering handfuls of dry molasses (or plain old sugar if you don't want to go to a feed store and buy a bag of dry molasses) on top of the soil stimulated biological activity which also helps breakdown your existing mulch. Any kind of animal manure would do the same, but bringing in bagged or fresh manure is risky due to its contamination with the persistent herbicide residues that have become a gardener's nightmare in the 2000s.

You also could sow Elbon rye in your garden beds now. Let the grain sprout and grow. About a month before you want to plant, mow it down and rototill it into the soil (or dig it in by hand). This will add a lot of nitrogen to your soil.

Or, you can add an organic fertilizer with a high (well, high for organic fertilizers as they are mostly low in nitrogen anyway) nitrogen content now and let the nitrogen in the fertilizer work on breaking down your carbons.

It takes years to get great soil. We started working on our horrible red clay in 1998 while the house was still under construction, and it was a good 6-8 years before we really felt like we were winning the war to convert it to good soil. We have great soil now, but keep it great by constantly adding new layers of organic matter, both carbons and greens, year-round to the soil and letting it break down in place. Soil improvement is a marathon, not a sprint, and to get good plant growth you probably will need to use fertilizers for at least the first few years.

For strawberries, I don't really do anything but cut off diseased foliage or cut back the plants hard one time after they are through producing for the year. I'm a very hands-off strawberry gardener. The plants put out new runners and produce well every year, so I mostly leave them alone and let them be. You can transplant runners to increase the number of plants you have. Some people put a lot of time and management into their strawberry beds, but I'm not one of those people.

I generally don't fertilize my asparagus plants. All they get is a new layer of 6-8" of chopped/shredded autumn leaves/grass clippings (mixed together) added to the top of the bed in the fall. It breaks down over the winter and feeds the plants. I add more mulch in spring to keep the weeds down. Our asparagus plant produce huge monster plants and thumb-sized spears, so I don't think I need to add fertilizer. I probably fertilized them their first couple of years just to get them established and if I did, it is likely I used Espoma Garden-Tone or fish emulsion. I no longer remember what I did, but they are fine with little to no care now that they are established. I was careful to not harvest from them until their third year.

I don't grow apples because of all their disease issues so can't help you with them.

So here's where I get confused about using mowed clippings in the garden. What if one has let the grass get long and they have seeds on them? And what if they are mostly a blend of weeds and grass. Is that okay to slap on your garden?

Does anyone have a good link that explains the different weeds/grasses that grow in Oklahoma? Are there some that are...maybe perennial (and would grow fresh each spring/summer from the roots?) and some that are annuals (their roots are done at the end of each year so leaving them in the ground won't cause them to regrow, but they've spread seeds to make new grass/weeds?)?

I hope those questions makes sense. I get how Bermuda grass works...but that's about it really. As I was digging grass and weeds out of the garden on Monday, I was wondering about all the different things I was digging out. Like a dandelion...if a tiny piece of root stays in the ground but you get most of it, will it regrow? Will they come back year to year?

I just don't want to dump a lot of unwanted seeds on my garden.

I get weed seeds and grass seeds via water flowing downhill from the higher ground to our south and via the wind. Out here in the country, those seeds get around quite easily, so I don't worry about dumping them in the garden via grass clippings because they are going to find their way into the garden anyway. If you want to, you can put down a layer of cardboard or newspaper beneath the grass clippings and that layer usually keeps them from sprouting....or it keeps the roots shallow (above the newspaper and/or cardboard) and the weeds are easy to pull out when young. Most of the time, we manage to mow before the grass sets seed anyway, and sometimes if I notice that we mowed too late and there's tons of seedheads, we just don't collect that batch of clippings. This is one reason I prefer winter rye grass---it doesn't go to seed until the weather is really heating up in late spring, and by that time we have collected clippings from it for months, making it an effective off-season source of nitrogen for the garden beds or compost piles.

In late winter, spring and early summer, I spend a huge amount of time weeding. I do that for a reason----not just to keep the beds clean and weed-free, but also because I know I cannot do that sort of weeding once venomous snakes are roaming freely. You just learn to go with whatever works for you in your location with your conditions. I find that in my conditions that I experience routinely (including the snake issues) what works for me is to mulch early and often with everything I can get my hands on prior to the onset of snake-i-ness in the garden. The thicker the layers of mulch, the less weed seeds sprout overall. The less weeds overall, the better I can see snakes. The better I can see the snakes, the later in the spring/summer I can pull out weeds. It is a cycle I understand well, but I also know that at some point every year we just get too snakey for weeding and then it becomes even more important to pour the grass clippings on top of the existing mulch layers weekly because dumping grass clippings on the beds is safer (snake-wise) than pulling weeds. I haven't weeded since I stopped watering and that means the garden is almost too snakey to step foot in at this point, but I can go out there on a really cool morning (assuming the night also was very cool, and not just that a cold front rolled through around sunrise) and harvest early before snakes are out and about. My garden generally is not really snake-free until we've had several freezing nights, and so far we haven't had any.

If you are concerned about weed and grass seeds sprouting, use them in compost piles in the fall, layered with autumn leaves and spent garden plants so you have a good mix of greens and browns. In the fall, I can build a compost pile 5-8' tall by alternating layers of autumn leaves/spent garden plants with fresh grass clippings (usually rye) and it will decompose into beautiful compost to add to the garden beds by mid-spring to late-spring, depending on what the winter weather was like. The heat from a hot compost pile will make the weed and grass seeds sterile and they won't sprout.

There are perennial weeds and annual weeds, both broadleaf and grassy. After about a decade of rigorously weeding and mulching and doing everything I could to keep weed seeds out of the garden (and being pretty successful at doing so), along came the exceptionally rainy year of 2007, which dumped not just weed seeds in my garden but up to 4" of sandy soil washed downhill from the neighbor's property next door. I had 4" of sand, silt, plant debris, sticks, rocks, weed seeds, etc. sitting on top of 4-6" of mulch which was sitting on top of relatively weed-free soil. That's what happens when a river of rainoff runs through your garden, and I was back to square one in terms of eradicating the weeds/weed seeds from the garden. I've come to accept that despite my best efforts, I'll never have a garden that is weed-free. Mother Nature is going to do what she does, and she not only spreads weed seeds via wind and rain runoff, but via insects, birds, small mammals, large mammals (deer plant persimmons all over our place all the time), etc. Thus, I don't fret about keeping out all the weed seeds because I've learned that Mother Nature bats last and she generally wins. I just do the best I can each year to keep the weeds as under control as possible. Perhaps in a more urban or suburban location, Mother Nature is not such a hard taskmaster, but out here in the sticks, you might as well learn to work with her because you won't defeat her. I've had to let go of my dream of relatively clean, weed-free garden beds.

Here's a list of Oklahoma's noxious weeds:

Noxious Weeds

Here's a list of wildflowers that bloom by month. Just click on each month to see the list of wildflowers, bearing in mind that much of what we consider weeds in our garden are just broadleaf wildflowers that have chosen to grow where we did not plant them. Under each month, you can click on each listed wildflower/weed to see what it looks like.

Wildflower Bloom By Month/Date

On this webpage you can see common weeds of Oklahoma (but there's many more than is shown on this list):

Weeds of Oklahoma

Yes, there are plenty of weeds that will regrow from only a small portion of a root or runner left behind. I had to dig down 9-12" deep or even deeper in my garden repeatedly over many years to get out some of the more persistent plant roots, like those of ragweed and greenbrier, and they still try mightily to reinvade the garden every so often.

While gardeners tend to have the mindset that all weeds are bad, some of my favorite plants are weeds. Henbit is a good example. I have no special affection for it personally and used to yank out every single henbit plant that sprouted. Over the years, though, I noticed how much the winter/early spring butterflies and bees rely on henbit for their survival at a time when little to nothing else is blooming for them, so nowadays when I see henbit springing up, I leave enough of it around the yard to feed the bees and the butterflies. I'd prefer a more weed-free garden, but not at the expense of the survival of the bees and butterflies. I have had to adjust my thinking in that manner a LOT since moving here. If I want to live in/garden in an ecosystem filled with lots of little beneficial insects, I have to let the plants grow that they need, and there are times when their needs supercede my desire to keep the weeds out of my beds.

Dawn

Hazel, I hesitate to use grass clippings on my garden too, but because of Bermuda spread.

Thanks for all the info, Dawn. I also like a lot of the weeds and wildflowers. I leave them right in the garden in a place of honor sometimes. For example, yarrow. Love the stuff. I don't expect a weed-free garden at all...but there are spaces in my garden that actually became a "yard" again. Just because of the busyness of the summer and remodel. I'm trying to dig all that up now. Hard work and we really haven't had much rain even though places near us have had much more.

I"m just trying to figure out why my raised beds are so nitrogen deficient even though we brought in "garden ready" soil. Except the beds where peas were planted. I need to learn the cover crop method...but doubt I'll have time to do that this year. Maybe I'll just douse the seedlings with miracle grow next spring. Not my preferred method..but oh well.

I know, Melissa, right? Bermuda grass is awful. It's crept back into my garden--it's so stubborn.

The coneflowers...do y'all just leave them alone or do you cut them back in the winter? From what I understand, if you want to use Echinacea for medicine you really need to use 3 or 4 year old roots.

Okay. My garden is not ready to be put to bed for the winter. What was I thinking? I just took a stroll and it's still producing lots of stuff. The pea trellises blew over maybe 3 weeks ago, but the plants haven't died yet--just lying on the ground. I picked them up this morning and those plants are full of peas and blossoms.

So...peas, watermelon, okra, honeydew, pumpkins, peppers, herbs, flowers, and tomatoes. Unfortunately the stink bugs are getting to most of the tomatoes.

When do y'all cut down your asparagus. Some of mine are getting close to my height 5'3. I like how they look in the garden--all wild and crazy and blowing in the wind.

Hazel, I have parts of my garden ever year where I seem to lose the battle and those sections start reverting to grass/pasture. It happens when the garden gets too snakey for me and I back off on the weeding for obvious reasons. I just clean it out really well after we're cold enough that snakes aren't a problem any more (often that doesn't happen until latest November) and resolve to do better the next year. Sometimes I do better the next year, and sometimes I don't, but I keep trying.

Your garden beds might be deficient in nitrogen for several possible reasons----perhaps enough nitrogen wasn't there to begin with. If you did not deliberately add nitrogen, then it likely wasn't there. You can work around that by adding amendments high in nitrogen like blood meal, which is my favorite for adding quick nitrogen in an appreciable amount. However, whenever I use blood meal (or bone meal), I get vultures circling the garden for days looking for the blood (or bones) they're smelling. It is sort of comical. Other good organic sources of nitrogen include fish meal, kelp meal, cottonseed meal and corn gluten meal (CGM is almost as high in nitrogen as blood meal). Nitrogen (depending on the form it is in) can leach out of soil very easily when there's lots of rain, so even if you start out the year with good nitrogen levels, heavy rainfall or irrigation can leach away the nitrogen. One reason I like to use grass clippings so much is that they supply a constant source of nitrogen as they break down. No matter how many inches of grass clippings I add to any garden area each year, there's virtually nothing left of them by winter because they were continually breaking down and the nitrogen was being used up by the plants.

All the more natural, organic sources of nitrogen are very low in nitrogen compared to highly-manipulated commercial products like Ammonium Nitrate or Ammonium Sulfate, which can have a NPK whose N number ranges from 21 to 33, so when you garden organically without the use of something like Ammonium nitrate or Ammonium sulfate, you have to add nitrogen to the growing beds throughout the growing season as plants use it up very quickly. Obviously an organic fertilizer with an NPK of 5-1-2 or something similar isn't feeding plants a high level of any given nutrient. I have had friends convert to organic gardening and then become very frustrated with the slow growth of their plants. They got slow growth because their soil was deficient in nutrients and they weren't adding enough nutrients because they didn't understand that organic fertilizers are very low in N-P-K compared to synthetic formulations, or they thought that soil conditioners also serve as sources of nutrients (and they do, but only at very low levels, and not enough for plant growth without the use of organic fertilizers in addition to soil conditioners). It also takes a while for an organic garden to develop the biological herd of bacteria, fungi, etc. needed to help break down organic amendments into usable nutrients, and that is something that folks who are newish to growing organically may not take into consideration. This is one of the reasons that Espoma products contain bacteria added to them to help improve the soil's ability to use the nutrients in the products.

Manure is a perfect example. While people tend to think of it as a fertilizer, it really isn't that high in nutrients. It functions better as a soil conditioner, and it is a great soil conditioner. It is not a great fertilizer. When I first switched over to growing organically, I probably gave both manure and compost more credit than they deserved. Both are important and both have their place in the garden, but alone, they are not enough...hence the need for other soil conditions and fertilizers to make up for what they lack.

I also want to point out that because nitrogen can be highly mobile in the soil, it can be very hard to get a reliable nitrogen number from a soil test. Because of this, some labs don't even test for nitrogen any more because the results can be all over the place depending on the temperatures at the time the soil is collected and the amount of rainfall. It is common to get a low nitrogen reading during cool weather, for example. However, I think your garden was truly nitrogen-deficient and that your soil test was correct because you did mention sluggish growth throughout the season, and that seems indicative of low nitrogen.

Soil is very complicated, and I focus more on soil pH than on nitrogen levels. That is because my specific natural soil pH is high enough to interfere in nutrient uptake, so that even if there's plenty of nutrients in the soil, the nutrients can be bound up in the soil by the pH and not be available for uptake by the plant roots. So, I have to get my soil pH right or nothing else really matters. In the early years I really struggled with the soil pH, but the soil in most of the garden has been amended well enough at this point that it isn't such a struggle any more. However, there's never a point where you get your soil pH to a certain point and don't have to worry about it any more. I just have to worry about it less now than I did 10 or 15 or `17 years ago. Our water is high pH so it always thwarts our efforts to keep the soil at a lower pH level.

With asparagus, I usually cut it back after it has turned brown in autumn (often this doesn't happen until after a few frosts) since it no longer is involved in active growth at that point. I throw the asparagus I've cut back onto the compost pile, and then pile 4 to 6 inches of mulch (usually a mixture of autumn leaves and grass clippings) over the asparagus bed. The heavy mulch will help keep winter weeds from sprouting in the asparagus beds and also will keep the asparagus from waking up too early in winter. Well, unless winter is throwing an occasional 80 or 90 degree day into the mix, which sometimes wakes up the asparagus and starts it growing far too early. If you cut back your asparagus too early in fall, it often begins to regrow, so I just wait for it to show clear signs that it is done for the year.

Dawn

My test was done in June.

My plants were stunted nearly after sprouting. So weird. This type of stunting didn't happen last year. But those "last year" beds were fine this year too. It's the new beds in the new areas of the garden. Except the ones that peas grew in--those did well.

Thanks, Dawn, for all the info. I appreciate it. I'm tracking along the same advice you're giving. Intuition is useful at times.

You're welcome. Sometimes that sort of stunting is related to tiny traces of herbicide residue or to cold weather, but it also is common in new beds that likely don't have a lot of nutrients present in a readily available form. The way my amended soil perform in its first few years is nothing at all the way it performs now after so many years of amending. It just keeps getting better every year. I suspect your soil will be the same way. Now that we finally have good soil, I have almost (but not quite) forgotten how hard it was to get that soil to produce well in the early years.

Here's what I do , but I start around Labor Day. I just took this pic today, its Austrian Pea and oats, mostly , with a little brassica ( and some volunteer zennia )

I buy this seed meant for deer hunters to use for their food plots

Buy from Amazon , here

Winter PZ

I have to purchase a 10# bag for my small garden, but its lasted four seasons. I finally used the last of it this year.

The pea provides a nitrogen fix while the oats are just organic matter I can till in come January. Both will endure down to 10* temps. The oats get about two feet high and I chop them down with the weed eater, mulch with the mower, and then till them in.

I've not added any fertlizer to the garden in years. I get my soil tested in Feb every year, and they tell me to add nitrogen in four or five months, but I've never done that. I've just tilled the oats back in and added leaves I get from local landscape crews.