Getting your garden, ready for the spring

GOOD SOIL IS essential for growing great vegetables. Winter is a good time to start getting your soil ready for your next crop. With a little bit of work, you will have the best veggies ever.
Of course, the first step is the soil prep. Gardeners who are in the know start in the fall, right after pulling out their last vegetable plants, by adding two to three inches of compost to the existing soil. If you haven’t already, add your compost now.
If you have not planted a cover crop as yet, next year be sure to plant a cover crop to further improve the soil. Cover crops are mostly planted from seed in the fall. One example is fava beans. Cover crops release nitrogen from their roots into the soil. Nitrogen improves plant growth. There are various cover crops. A few common examples are fava beans, rye, and vetch etc. As the cover crops grow, simply cut them back, leaving the cuttings with the crop. When it is finally time to plant your vegetable garden, just till the cover crop down and either mulch it into the soil or put the plant scraps in your composting bin.
Fruit Trees and Flowers
January is a good time to care for your fruit trees. Prune your fruit trees and then apply fungicide and dormant sprays to prevent disease. These sprays help protect the trees against mites, aphids, and scale insects. Fungicides and dormant spray are best applied when trees have few or no leaves, which makes for an even application. Do not apply these sprays during the rain. Spraying the trees after the rains make the sprays work better.
If you had peach leaf curl on your peach or nectarine trees last year, now is the best time to treat it. Apply a copper based fungicide. If there are heavy rains, it may have to be applied more than once. Prune your summer blooming shrubs, flowering vines, roses and hydrangeas as well.
Potted Plants
Outdoor potted plants need to be checked for water. Even though we have had rains, if the potted plants are under porches or under trees they may not have received enough water. In January the weather is still so cold, and plants that are well watered are able to protect themselves better than those with dry soil.
Weeds
This is also a good time to stay ahead of the game by weeding right away. With all our recent rain, the soil should be moist and that makes it so much easier to weed!
Planting
Plant bare root trees, roses, shrubs and vines. Seeds of cool season vegetables like lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and others can be started indoors now.
And yes, last but not the least winter is the time to start the planning for your summer garden.
Malar Sampathkumar is a Santa Clara County Master Gardener. Call their hotline from 9:30 to 12:30, Monday through Friday at 408-282-3105 Get more great information from our website: mastergardener.org.