Yard Checklist: Winterizing in December

We've made some progress winterizing the yard! There's snow in the forecast which kicked us into high gear to finish getting things ready. Or more ready for winter at least. 

It's cold enough consistently now that it was time to put up bubble wrap again on the ceiling of the greenhouse. last year I took it down in big pieces, so it was easy to put it back up this time. 

Things in the greenhouse are good. Nothing is dead, though things are dying back as expected for this time of year. The lack of light, the cold nights, it's hibernation time! The fig tree in the pot lost all its leaves. The lemon verbena is shedding leaves. The jasmine is very yellow (it doesn't like the cold). Cool weather plants like the sage are doing great right now. I'm even getting snapdragons and geraniums to bring inside. 

Mike wrapped the fig tree. We trimmed it back, wrapped it in bungee cords and then he wrapped it up with house insulation and plastic wrap. This year we topped it with a bucket too, which is a lot easier than wrapping the top, a trick we learned from our neighbors who have fig trees (apparently it's quite trendy around here to have a fig tree now, with good reason, they are awesome). The insulation and plastic worked REALLY well last year. We've never had so many figs, it was awesome. Hopefully this year we have similar results. 

The last of the raised bed garden has been pulled up. We had a big freeze that finally nipped the snapdragons, so I pulled them up and finished wrapping up the bed for winter. The garden is officially put to bed (the herb and strawberry bed in the back stays as-s, and the yarrow in the front right bed is overwintering there and will be moved in the spring). 

I trimmed the forsythia bush, which has been on my list for months. I had to wait for it to go into hibernation and drop its leaves, which didn't happen until the very end of November. I cut it back to the base stalks because it was overgrown, outgrew every trim too quickly and stopped blooming. I did some research and it seems to only way to get it to flower again is to give it this extreme makeover.  It won't bloom in spring of 2022 either, but I did it with hope for blooms in the spring of 2023. This also gives me a chance to reshape the bushes, since they were out of control. 

I'm still in the middle of cleaning up the garden beds on the sides along the fences and under the trees. I made a dent, but there's still along way to go. I cleaned up everything that had powdery mildew and blight already and disposed of it. What's left can be done as I can get to it, or even in the spring if we get a lot of snow, otherwise I'll do a little bit at at time - or one load at a time headed for the composter. 

Things that we have to put off until spring: painting the garage spots, painting the mailbox, staining the deck (which will honestly become part of staining parts of the pergola too I think). More big projects for spring than I wanted (anticipating a busy season)... but we'll have to make it work. I don't know how we keep running out of time, but we do!