 Hi there and welcome to Little Garden on the prairies. So it is the 25th of September here on the Saskatchewan prairies and it is an absolutely gorgeous day to be outside working in the garden. I'm getting things ready for winter because here on the prairies you never know when that first snowfall could hit. We've had a great fall here on the prairies though it's been hardly any freezing temperatures at night so far which is great and I am just in front of a huge pile of tree mulch that has been sitting here for about a year. Last year we needed to cut down some big poplars that were a little too close to the house. They didn't have any disease or anything they were just too big and too close so we chopped them down and the guys that did the chopping for us mulched all the branches and leaves for me and dumped it here last summer. So this has been sitting here for a year now. I haven't used a whole lot of it all summer but it is beautiful stuff. All the leaves have you know are decomposing the wood chips are nice and small so I've been trying to haul it to my garden in this little wagon and my husband Preston thankfully came along with his good steer in the bucket and we dumped a whole pile of it in the garden. I want to make use of this stuff before it just you know breaks down and goes to waste so we're going to be using it to mulch all over the garden to keep the weeds down. I'm going to be using it in my garden beds and in my containers as a mulch over the winter that hopefully will break down and add some more nutrients to all my containers. So in addition to this job there are a whole lot of other things that I need to get done before the winter season hits. Here in zone 3 the temperatures start to drop you know usually in October and into November and then from there it is subzero temperatures all the way till probably March. So there's a lot to get done so I hope you will enjoy watching me get ready for the winter here in zone 3 Saskatchewan. So before bringing in the wood chips I've been prepping my garden space here and I've collected a lot of cardboard that I want to use to sheet mulch just to help with that weed control again. So I've spread out as much cardboard as I could find. I also had a roll of plastic wrap that I'm using in between these tubs so that it will keep the weeds from growing up in between them. So after spreading out I have wetted it down as much as I can with the garden hose and I have also moved my containers. I had two rows of the tubs before but now I have put them together hopefully creating more garden space here that I can do some more growing in next year. So it was a bit of a tight fit to get into the garden with this gid steer but Preston managed to maneuver his way into the space here and dump about three piles. So it was pretty easy to spread this wooden mulch around with a shovel and a rake. I've pretty much covered up all the cardboard that I had spread out. I have a lot here in the front of my container gardens and spreading it around and also adding it to the containers just to keep them mulched over the winter and I even had a little helper with me for part of this job. So I think having all the decomposing leaves and the very small pieces of wood chips will make a great mulch on my containers over the winter. The snow will compress them down and hopefully some nutrients will work their way into the soil. So we'll see what kind of breakdown we have in the spring once the snow melts. So I'm also planning to hopefully set up some kind of irrigation system in all my containers which is one of the reasons why I've pushed all the red ones together. I'm hoping that I can set up a drip system running from our well just to help water all these containers. I found last year it was very hard to keep them well watered and I think it affected the you know the harvest that I got last year. So I'll be doing a lot of YouTubing this winter figuring out how to set up a drip system and hopefully in the spring we'll have a plan in place. So after getting all my wood chips spread out and all my containers covered I gave everything a really good soaking and we'll probably do that several times this fall until freeze up just to make sure everything's well saturated and the wood chips will break down a little bit faster. So before dumping out some of my flower pots here I like to see if I can collect some seeds that I can save over the winter and then start in early spring and winter indoors. Some of them ones that I have the best success with are the petunias. So I'm going to just looking for branches that have these little pods here and I just instead of trying to collect the seeds right now I will just throw them in a bag mark the color and what kind of flower it is and then later on in the winter I will work on collecting seeds from them. This way they get a good chance to really dry out. So this year I'll probably just be collecting a variety of colors of petunias and marigolds. I missed out on a few of the other flowers that got frozen and I didn't collect seeds from them right away but this will be a good start anyway. This here is my special geranium plant that was my mother's that we managed to save from her basement over the winter the winter that she passed away and I've been able to bring this geranium plant back to life every year. So what I do is I just before it gets too cold outside I just start kind of hacking it down. It blooms so beautifully this summer it really did well and then I just let it go dormant put it in my garage which is a heated garage and just leave it there over winter kind of in a dark corner in the garage and then in early February I'll start watering it again and I usually try to take some cuttings off of it as well. So after I have cleaned out all my pots from the vegetables and flowers that were growing I like to just have a spot to dump all my pots so this little kitty paddling pool works really well. So I just dump all my soil from different containers in there and then in the spring I can reuse it to as a filler in some of my pots again or mix it with some new soil and nutrients to just to kind of make the dirt go a little bit further. So I got two kinds of garlic here I'm going to try planting up this fall one is called a hardneck just a basic hardneck garlic and the other one is called a Russian purple. So I'm just going to take these all apart get these cloves ready to go into the ground. So out of six bulbs that I got purchased here I think this one here was seven this was six so that was you know about 13-14 dollars I got 24 bulbs some really nice big ones but I don't know that's a good deal or not and then these are mine that I harvested as you can see they are about the size of one of these cloves here pretty tiny but whatever I think I'll take these three also and we'll plant them up and see what kind of bulbs we can get out of them next year. So there's not really much here to see now that I've done planting it but what I've done here is I've done two rows with the bottom garlic bulbs that I purchased and then I've done a third row here of bulbs that came from garlic that I harvested from my garden this year. So next year that way I will know that this third row here is my garlic and this is the bottom and I'll have something to compare to. So time to cover these up now. So I'm just going to start off by covering lightly with some repurposed potting soil here. Get a little soil right off before I put back some of this straw. I had put down cardboard here a couple years ago and covered it with straw to try to keep the weeds down and you can see some of the cardboard still hasn't fully broken down. So I'm just going to push it to the sides, cover it with some of my wood chip mulch, just let it continue breaking down and hopefully suppress some weeds in the meantime. If anybody's an expert on garlic planting and sees anything I'm doing wrong let me know because I really am not an expert in garlic. So here in zone 3 there's a few things that come back you know over the winter time because we have such harsh cold winters. Temperatures drop you know to the minus 30 degrees Celsius minus 40. Hard to grow a lot of things that come back like even where we live here we have very sandy soil so it's very tough to even grow perennials successfully and have them survive the winters here. So I always find anything, any sign of life that you see come up on this spring, especially here where we don't get much is always very exciting so that's why I love planting garlic because it's you know fun to see it come up in this early spring. Okay fingers crossed we see some garlic here in the spring. So this is my lasagna garden bed where I usually grow annual flowers and I'm always trying to get perennials going. I feel like the choke cherry bushes in the back of the fence really stole a lot of the sunlight and maybe some of the moisture so I've cut a bunch of those branches out and removed them from the area. So I will be also mulching this with a bunch of wood chips this fall to see how it improves in the spring and see if we can get some better luck with our annuals and perennials. Cleaning up the garden shed is a job that I have not yet tackled but what has to get done before the winter as you can see it's a disaster and it has been a disaster pretty much all summer. After spring when you get planting everything it seems like this becomes the dumping ground for empty pots and containers so I need to sort through this get it cleaned up before the fall. So maybe there'll be another video coming before the winter season hits. And because I've been doing most of my watering of the garden with garden hose I have several hundred feet to clean up so I start off by trying to drain all the water out of the hoses first before wrapping them up and storing them in the garden shed. So I'm hoping next year if I can get a good irrigation drip system going that I won't need to be doing so much watering by hand and won't need hundreds of feet at garden hose to get around my yard. So I hope you enjoyed watching me tackle some of my jobs that are necessary to be done in the fall here in zone 3 Saskatchewan getting ready for the winter. I do still have a quite a few things to get done in the yard so there could be a part two to this coming up on my channel. Please hit that like button leave a comment and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel. Happy gardening!