12 Things You Can Do This Fall on Your Wild Homestead

Fall is here in the northern hemisphere and I bet you’re getting ready to put your garden to sleep for the winter. Perhaps you have a fall crop planted but did you know there are a bunch of things you can do now to boost your wild homestead come spring?

This week’s blog post—12 Ways to Boost Your Wild Homestead This Fall—covers 12 different actions you can take on your wild homestead this fall. These actions are broken into 4 core categories:

1. Building Soil
2. Preparing the Land for Planting
3. Planting Perennial Plants
4. Creating Space to Connect with Your Land

Each of these 12 actions will help ensure you have a more productive year next year then you did this year.

What actions do you take in the fall? Please leave a comment with your answer!

Building Soil

Make sure to check out the blog post for the other 3 categories but here are my recommendations for actions you can take this fall to build your soil.

1. Chop-and-drop
2. Place mulch on your soil
3. Place large woody debris on your soil

All 3 of these methods work on the same basic principles—they provide a cover on the soil to slow down evaporation and prevent erosion, they add organic material to the soil, and they provide shelter and food for beneficial soil life such as fungi.

Chop-and-drop is the easiest to implement since it just involves returning any pruned plant material back to the soil. As you are pruning just chop it into small pieces and drop it onto the soil. It really is as simple as that.

This free mulch will return fertility to your soil and help ensure your soil stays moist and fertile come spring and summer.

But sometimes adding extra mulch is needed. In this case bringing in mulch from outside areas (either from other spots on your own wild homestead or from your neighbors) can be a great way to boost your wild homestead.

Fall is a great time for this because people are often getting rid of the leaves that fall on their property. I always make sure to get a couple hundred bags of fall leaves from my neighbors each year.

The 3rd action you can take is to add logs and large branches to the surface of your growing areas. These can shelter your plants from sun and wind and they create moist pockets underneath them. These sheltered and moist areas provide great habitat for beneficial soil life.

But the logs and branches also slowly breakdown and release nutrients back into the soil through the actions of fungi. This is especially true if the log and branches are partially buried each year from you adding fresh mulch (actions 1 and 2—see how this all relates?) around the log/branches.

These are just 3 of the 12 actions you can take this fall that are covered in the blog post. Make sure to check out the post to learn more!

What Actions Do You Take in the Fall?

So what do you think? Are you taking these actions on your wild homestead? Are you taking other actions not covered in this post?

Please leave a comment with your answer. I would love to hear from you!

Thank you!

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When you work with nature, nature works with you.