The Winter Garden Handoff — Fillable Winterizing Planner PDF | 14 Pages

The garden dies back in October. Your memory of it goes shortly after.

Everything you know about this year's garden — what died, what you moved, where the tulips went, which hydrangea you were not supposed to cut — is held in exactly one place, and that place is about to spend four months thinking about other things. Every gardener rediscovers this every spring, usually with a fork through a dahlia tuber.

The Winter Garden Handoff is a 14-page fillable winterising planner: what to do and in what order, counted from your own frost date, plus the pages to write it all down for the version of you who walks outside on the first warm day with no memory of October.

What's inside

• A timeline built on your frost date, not a calendar — nine stages from six weeks before first hard frost through to deep winter, tickable, with room for the date you actually did it
• Bed by bed — every growing area you own, one row each, named the way you actually refer to it
• Cut back, or leave standing — the argument settled: what to cut, what to leave as winter housing, and the woody herbs that will not forgive you
• Roses, hydrangeas and young shrubs — the three things most often killed by good intentions in autumn
• What went in the ground — bulbs, garlic and bare root, recorded precisely enough to find again
• Lifted and overwintered — where the dahlias went, what they need, and a monthly check round from November to March
• Mulch, protection, water, tools and structures — the jobs that cost real money if you skip them
• What died, and why — the honest page, and the most useful one in the book
• The Handoff — a letter to yourself in March: the first three jobs in order, what you moved, what is planted where you cannot see it, what to take off before it wakes up
• Next year — caught while it is still fresh, with an order-by column

Genuinely fillable — not just printable

Most winterising checklists are a static PDF with lines drawn on them. This one has 506 real form fields. Type straight into every blank, table cell and tick box on a laptop, tablet or phone. Or print it and use a pencil, which is what most of us do with cold hands.

Works in any climate

Every date is written as a number of weeks before or after your first hard frost, never as a calendar date, because a calendar date is useless to anyone standing in a different garden. Fill in your zone and your frost dates on page two and the rest of the book resolves itself.

Details

• 14 pages, US Letter (8.5 x 11"), portrait
• Fillable PDF with 506 form fields, including tick boxes
• Instant digital download
• Works in Adobe Acrobat Reader, Apple Preview, most browsers, and iPad
• Print at 100% scale (not "fit to page") to keep the tables accurate

Please note

This is a digital download. Nothing physical will be shipped to you. Because the file is delivered instantly, all sales are final.

For personal use only. Please don't resell, redistribute or share the file.