I started How to Winterize Garden because of a $640 plumbing bill.
In November 2008, a few weeks after I moved into my house outside Madison, Wisconsin, I left a garden hose attached to the outdoor faucet. The water inside froze, the pipe behind the wall split, and nobody noticed until a puddle showed up in the basement in March. The same winter took six new rosebushes I had not mulched and a terracotta pot I had left full of soil on the patio. I bought a notebook that spring and wrote down everything I should have done. I have filled one every year since.
A Garden Center Education
For ten years, from 2006 to 2016, I worked at a family-owned garden center. I started at the register and ended up managing the perennial department. Customers asked me the same questions every season, and I learned more from answering them than from any class I took.
I also wrote the store’s monthly newsletter for six years. That job taught me to explain a garden task in plain words that someone can follow on a Saturday morning with a wheelbarrow and a free hour.
What Grows Here
My garden sits on half an acre in USDA zone 5. The first hard frost usually arrives in early October, and the ground can stay frozen into April.
Four raised beds hold my vegetables, and garlic goes in every October. I have perennial borders, three apple trees planted where an ash tree stood before emerald ash borer killed it, a strip of native prairie that replaced 1,200 square feet of lawn, and a Chicago Hardy fig that I wrap every November.
What You Will Find Here
Winter preparation is still the subject I know best, so it gives the site its name. I write about the whole garden year, though. Vegetables and fruit, perennials and bulbs, lawns, trees and shrubs, containers, soil and compost, pests, tools and watering all get their turn.
Every method I recommend has been tried in my own yard first, and I check it against university extension research before it goes online. You can read how I research and test every garden method in detail, including what I do when I get something wrong. My yard is not your yard, so I also tell you when my zone 5 timing needs adjusting for a warmer or colder climate.
Why I Keep Writing
Gardening advice online tends to come in two flavors. One is so general it could apply anywhere, and the other is trying to sell you something.
I want this site to read like a conversation at the garden center counter, with a straight answer, the reason behind it and an honest note when a step is optional. If a free pile of shredded leaves does the job, I will not point you to a $40 product.
My advertising disclosure explains how the site earns money and why advertisers have no say in my recommendations.
