You can use grass clippings from mowing the lawn to mulch your garden, and you can also use them to protect bare soil as winter approaches. denise1203/Shutterstock

It’s time to start preparing for next year’s gardening season.

I can sense my regular readers protesting that they aren’t done with this season yet. They want to enjoy the fall foliage, the asters and other late bloomers. There are apples to pick and pumpkins to harvest.

I’m confident you can handle doing several things at once. Before the snow flies, a few tasks you do now will help ensure your flower and vegetable beds are more productive next year.

By now, you’ve harvested all, or at least most, of the vegetables in your garden. At this point the soil is naked, and that’s not good. The freezing and thawing over the coming winter will destroy its structure and allow nutrients to leach away. Best to cover the garden with something. But what?

Cover crop of vetch, oats and clover. Many farmers use cover crops to suppress weeds and protect the soil. Jennifer Larsen Morrow/Shutterstock

Commercial farmers plant cover crops, such as winter rye, oats, or peas. These suppress weeds and add nutrients to the soil. I tried oats in our garden one year, but because they should be planted six weeks before the average first frost, it’s too late to do so now. Also, if your tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and such are still growing when you need to plant cover crops, you’re out of luck.

For many gardeners, a more practical solution is to add organic matter. Commercial farmers traditionally use manure, and if you live near dairy farms that can supply you, great. My wife, Nancy, and I used to buy it locally, but it’s no longer available, and I refuse to buy manure sold in plastic bags.

Now we add our own compost to the garden instead. If you use a compost company like Garbage to Garden, they may be able to supply you. Garbage to Garden, for instance, will deliver three-yard truckloads of compost to homes in southern Maine.

The simplest soil covering for most property owners are the leaves and grass clippings nature supplies for free right in their own gardens. Grass clippings – scarcer for us since we have shrunk the lawn – can be placed directly on the garden during the growing season or put in compost bins first.

You can rake the leaves from where you don’t want them – lawns, driveways and on the patio – to areas where they’re  beneficial, such as ornamental and vegetable gardens. The leaves will break down in time and provide organic matter to the soil. The trees on our property, though, are mostly oaks, which have thick, slow-to-compost leaves. Also, winter winds blow them around.

My solution? A leaf grinder. Smaller leaves decompose faster. Running over the leaves several times with your lawn mower achieves the same end, but the grinder is neater. Then, either put the ground leaves directly into the garden, or do what I do, which is to add them to our compost bins, and spread out the resulting leaf mulch the following year.

The organic matter that leaves add to the soil provides nutrients and reduces the need for commercial fertilizer. I used to think the leaves made the soil more acidic, and I’d need to balance things out with ground limestone. But research has shown that’s unnecessary. Yes, before the leaves decompose, they’ll make the soil more acidic, but the effect disappears in time.

The leaves also suppress, but do not eliminate, weeds. We still have to do a lot of weeding. Fortunately, the poppies and other wildflowers seem to come back every year, which is just what we want.

Tom Atwell is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth. He can be contacted at: tomatwell@me.com.