With winter comes the opportunity to retreat indoors, reflect, and plan for the active growing season. However, your garden still needs to be looked after, especially when it comes to potential damage from snow, ice, and salt – which can wreak havoc on your landscape.
Here are some of our preventative and maintenance tips to protect your garden and set it up for spring success:
How to Manage Snow and Ice
Depending on who you talk to, snow can be a pro or a con for the garden. In terms of pros, snow can provide insulation while stabilizing soil temperatures for hardier plants. Come warmer days; snowmelt will also provide an additional source of water.
However, heavy build-up of snow and ice on your landscape plants can prove to be detrimental to plants, causing branches to crack and split. For example, boxwood shrubs are prone to splitting from heavy snow or ice build-up.
- Remove Snow Regularly: Get ahead of removing snow from plants after every two inches of accumulation instead of waiting until it’s heavier.
- Remove Snow Gently: Remove light snow from plants with a broom by gently sweeping upwards. If you sweep downwards, you run the risk of breaking the branches.
- Protect Vulnerable Plants: Install a protective cage or snow fencing around the plant, or add stakes to stabilize the plant’s interior branches to prevent stress from heavy snow.
- Tie Plants Up: Before it snows, tie the branches of soft shrubs and conifers into a cone shape.
- Don’t Remove Ice: If ice has formed on branches, it’s best to wait until warmer temperatures to assess the damage. Caution: the branch might break if you try to remove the ice.
Using too much salt can be detrimental to your landscape and ultimately lethal to plants when it builds up in the soil.
How to Prevent Against Salt Damage
After a snowstorm, we’re faced with heavy snow and slippery walkways, so it’s easy to get carried away when scattering salt. Unfortunately, using too much salt can be detrimental to your landscape and ultimately lethal to plants when it builds up in the soil.
To protect your landscape from salt damage, follow these preventative measures and tips:
- Use Salt Alternatives: Coarse sand, gravel, and even kitty litter are more environmentally-friendly alternatives to salt. Although unfortunately, they won’t be able to melt ice, they still add a great deal of traction to the ground’s surface.
- Install Barriers: Put up barriers such as burlap screens or plastic snow fences to protect any plants along the roadside from salt spray. Another option, if you’re concerned with aesthetics, is to wrap the plants in burlap.
- Use Less Salt: Prevent against overuse of salt by mixing it with coarse sand. For more at-risk areas, such as walkways directly in the garden, use sand instead.
- Shovel Away From the Landscape: Be mindful when shoveling by ensuring salty snow is moved away from the landscape. Position piles of dirty snow so they’ll melt away from your garden instead of towards it.
Other Winter Maintenance Tips:
- Reduce Foot Traffic on Lawn: Grass that’s covered in snow is more likely to be uprooted or damaged, so keeping off the grass will prevent the snow from compacting and will allow it to melt faster.
- Prune Away Broken Branches: As soon as the ice melts, you’ll be able to assess the damage more. Broken branches should be pruned straight away to prevent disease–ensure you’re making clean cuts, as ragged tears are more likely to become infected.
- Repair Cracked Limbs: If small branches are cracked, you might be able to heal them by tying them firmly back together with electrical or grafting tape.
Daydreaming of spring already? Visit us at Plant Perfect in Bismarck, ND, to stock up on gardening supplies or pick up some houseplants to add to your growing collection!