Hi! I am Mitch Baker with American Plant in Bethesda. We’re talking about winterizing your ornamental garden, right now fertilizing.

Fall is a great time to fertilize as long as you’re using the right type of fertilizer. This would not be the time to use some fast-acting water-soluble high nitrogen fertilizer. What we’re going to use is a low fertility organic fertilizer that will be released slowly over the winter and give all these plants a boost in the spring.

So, rather than just toss this fertilizer on the surface of the mulch, this fertilizer needs to come into contact with the soil, so that it works its way down into the soil profile rapidly. So, we want to pull this mulch back if you have already mulched. Then we will apply the fertilizer to the soil surface and the mulch can go back on top of that. So we’re just going to spread some fertilizer around the entire root zone, we’ll just do a portion for now and then the mulch goes right back over the top of the fertilizer.

Then we want to water in, very important, we want to dissolve that fertilizer and pull it down into the soil profile. So get it into contact with the soil surface and then water it in right away. So again using the right type of fertilizer, an organic, slow-release slow fertility fertilizer; you can apply this to just about any tree, shrub, and perennial this time of year. So you want to use an organic, general purpose, low fertility fertilizer, apply it to the soil surface, mulch on top of that and then water it in, right away. That will get things off to a good start next spring.

Next, we will talk about transplanting.