Cleaning Out a Garden Gone Wild

We have the question in my email. “I did not plant my vegetable garden this year. I let it go wild. Should I clean it out this fall or wait until the spring?”

I would do both, to be honest. I would start, go ahead and clean it out now, get rid of any of the weeds and anything, especially things that are going to go to seed and that kind of stuff. And then in the spring, you could do any other maintenance. I would amend the soil in the spring.

You can do it fall or spring. But since you have kind of a wild patch, I would just clean that up and get that all ready to go and then amend your soil in the spring.

And getting the other weeds out this time of year, you’re preventing it from going to seed, which is saving you work next year trying to pull all those little weed seeds that come out. When you said going to seed, that’s what caught my attention because that would be something that would be tough and be worse next year.

Amending the soil would be adding like a sweet peat or a compost, some sort of an organic matter to your soil. Vegetables really like a rich organic soil, like it’s real dark and a lot of nutrients in it. So adding a compost or sweet peat or a bagged peat moss of some sort is really good to help.

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