EASY Winterizing for Raised Beds & Planting Garlic (+Cozy Pumpkin Muffins Recipe!)

Hey garden friends! 👋 In today’s video, I’m showing you how to plant garlic in fall and prep raised garden beds for winter — the simple, no-fuss way! If you’re wondering how to plant garlic or how to get your raised beds ready for winter, this video walks you through each step. 🧄

We’ll talk about soil prep, mulching, and easy garden cleanup to make sure your beds are ready for a healthy spring start. Plus — stick around till the end for some bonus gluten-free pumpkin muffins! 🎃 They’re cozy, delicious, and perfect for fall baking after a day in the garden.

00:00-1:10 Intro
1:11-3:14 Harvesting peppers and clearing the bed
3:15-8:11 How to plant garlic
8:12-11:30 How to prepare raised beds for winter
11:31-14:39 How to make gluten free pumpkin muffins

If you love fall gardening, homesteading, and cozy seasonal recipes, make sure to like, subscribe, and hit the bell 🔔 so you don’t miss the next video!

Gluten-Free Pumpkin Muffin Recipe: https://www.abbeyverigin.com/one-bowl-gluten-free-pumpkin-muffins-recipe-with-oat-flour/

#FallGardening #PlantGarlic #RaisedBedGarden #WinterGardenPrep #GlutenFreeBaking #HomesteadVlog #GardenTips #PumpkinMuffins #GarlicPlanting

[Music] Hey, baby. Baby. It’s a baby. That’s you. Hi guys. Welcome back to Heritage Homestead. It’s good to be back with you after a week away. I’ve been sick, so my voice isn’t quite normal, but I’m feeling ready for some time in the garden. We had our first nighttime nighttime temps in the 30s last night, so it’s time for me to get my garlic in the ground and get some of these garden beds ready for winter. Few of them are still full of fall crops. I’ve got kale, lettucees, broccoli, and I’ll cover those at night to protect them, but the rest of the garden’s ready to be tucked in. I’ve got my tiny, noisy assistant with me, so things might go slowly today, but they’ll get done. Uh, I’m going to start with harvesting the last of my peppers, and then we’re going to turn this bed over, turn it into garlic. Here you go. Can you drop it in there? Drop it in the basket. Put it in the basket. Good job. You got it, girl. This is my first year planting maragolds among my uh peppers and I did it for pest control, but the fringe benefit I hadn’t accounted for was just how pretty it would be. I every morning looked out the window down at this garden and just loved seeing these marolds in full bloom around my peppers. More flowers. more flowers in my future. It’s definitely what I’m looking for. I think I underestimated the utility of flowers. How much joy they’d bring me and how helpful they’d be in keeping a balanced garden. What are you doing, baby? Are you trying a bite? Is it yummy? No. No. Okay. Well, glad you’re eating it. Yummy. Oh, yummy. Oh, good. Here’s the last of the AI mango with the last of the bell peppers and jalapenos. Time to get all the plants out of this bed. Clear it out for garlic. Okay, come here. I’ll hold you. We’ve got an empty bed. a full wheelbarrow and a little pepper haul. My little assistant’s not in the mood for this, so I’m going to try again during her nap time. Okay, we’re back. It’s a lot brighter now cuz it’s afternoon, so the lighting’s a little crazy, but baby girl’s napping, which is the most important thing cuz now we can get this done. I’m going to top this bed off with compost um just to replenish some nutrients for the garlic and also because the soil level’s fallen. It’s always incredible to me how much the soil level lowers in a raised bed over the course of a season. So, let me get this topped off. So, I’m planting two varieties today. I have a bag of German extra hearty and a bag of music. These are both kinds that I grew last year. So, I did not buy any seed. I chose the very biggest, most beautiful cloves to save for seed because those have the qualities that I want to send into next year’s garden. Some of these cloves are massive. I was really pleased with this year’s harvest. For example, just take a look. Maybe you can get a sense of scale there from my glove. These are some goodiz cloves. So, I’m going to mark off my rows 6 in between each row. I’m using my seating square for spacing. The blue dots are 6 in apart. Makes things easy. [Music] And I can fit five rows in this bed. [Music] I always struggle to draw a straight line from one end to the next. So, this board is just right. I just dug it out of the garage. I don’t know what John has it for, but it’s serving a purpose. Oh, shoot. It’s just a tiny bit too long. Ah. All right. Well, that does not serve a purpose. So, well, then I guess I’ll drag it and that will be my trench line. Not exactly what I had envisioned. [Music] I’m sprinkling some bone meal in each of these trenches. It’s full of phosphorus, good for the development of large bulbs. [Music] So, these cloves are going in with 6 in spacing. You can leave the paper on. And of course, every clove has a pointy side. That’s the side we want up. That’s where the sprout’s going to come from. So, I’m going to push this down in cuz my trenches aren’t super deep. I want these about four to six inches below the surface of the soil. It’s hard to believe that it is mid October and I am starting the 2026 garden. Garlic’s the only thing I plant that you wait this long for payoff. It’s kind of fun that you get to get started in the fall. It’s like one garden bed that’s already planted. One little investment already made in next year. I like that. I love seeing them all lined up ready to grow and feed us for all of next year. Well, season our food for all of next year. [Applause] And for the last step, the leaves. This is leaf mulch. We happen to have a leaf mulcher. John was good to me and after work yesterday, spend an hour mulching a bunch of leaves. But if you don’t have a leaf mulcher, you can run a lawn mower over a bunch of leaves and it’ll chop them up and you get the same effect. I just find that mulching with leaves works better when they’re a little bit chopped up so that they can’t so easily blow away. So, we’re mulching so that we can keep this garlic nice and warm throughout the winter and keep it damp. It’s going to be happiest if it’s warm and it’s well watered. Oh, they smell so good. That is the smell of fall. Okay, I’m going to water one last time so that a breeze doesn’t just take all this good mulch away. I like to start with it nice and damp. Garlic check. That’s been on my list for a little while, so I’m glad to have it done. The last thing I’m going to do out here in the garden is prep one of my beds for winter. I thought I might prep a bunch of them, but running out of time and energy. Um, so we take time to prep the beds for winter because actually I shouldn’t really call it prepping for winter. It’s prepping for next gardening season. The 2026 garden is starting now with an investment in the soil. So, because this bed has given a lot over the summer and spring seasons, it needs to be replenished and prepared for the next season. I’ve seen lots of great articles and videos about prepping beds for winter. Um, but really the process is simple. You know, I’ve seen lists of 11 things to do in your garden to prepare for winter. I can manage two. So, if you’d all like me, do these two things if you’re a gardener. Compost, add compost, and cover. Compost and cover. We’re going to add some compost to the soil so that we replenish nutrients and it has some time um to release its nutrients and become available to plants for the spring. And we’re going to cover so that we keep the soil warm, keep all those nutrients of the compost in, whereas rain without the cover could um leech all the nutrients down to the bottom of the garden bed where they’re not as useful. Um, and we’re also covering just to keep those uh weed seeds out. I don’t want to start spring with a solid carpet of weeds in my garden. I know some gardeners like to do a little layer of green mulch before they compost. So they just chop up some of the things they’ve pulled out of the garden and then thinly sprinkle a layer on that’s can break down over the winter and the compost really helps that break down quickly. That’s great. That’s just not a time commitment level that I’m at right now. I’m at like squeeze as much as you can out of every minute cuz someone’s going to need you in the next minute kind of stage. So, if you want to add green mulch, great. But compost and cover will get the job done. For the cover, I’m going to use leaf mulch again because I have an almost endless supply of it. So, that works well for me and I like that the leaves break down a bit and add to the soil. A lot of people choose to cover with plastic tarping. Another option is to cover with cardboard if you like to steer clear of plastic. The leaves work for us, but use whatever you have on hand. That’s it for garden work for today. I’m ready for some pumpkin muffins. We ate these on repeat. Well, I made these on repeat last year. The family just kept tearing through them. And I brought you along for my pumpkin harvest recently. I’ve got pumpkin puree in the fridge. So, I’m ready for some good fall comfort food. [Music] These pumpkin muffins are gluten-free. They’re made with oat flour. Um, and I really like the texture. My husband and I happen to be mostly gluten-free, but this is something that I would feel good about serving to guests who aren’t gluten-free. I don’t think this recipe feels like a sacrifice when you’re eating it. So, maybe it’s just because it’s been a while since I’ve had things with gluten in them. Let me know if you feel differently, but I recommend it. So, this recipe starts with eggs from our chickens and then pumpkin from that nice harvest we got recently. I’m noticing that even though I only grew one kind of pumpkin, the color of the flesh has varied from one to the next, um, this one was particularly orange and the flavor was especially good. I’m guessing it has something to do with maturity and size. Maybe some of them were overly mature. I’m not sure, but I’m really enjoying this one. I’ll put a link for this recipe down below in the description, so don’t worry about it if you’re not catching all these ingredients. [Music] I’m looking forward to having these on hand for breakfast tomorrow morning. This is such a nice breakfast with a hot tea. My kids, my six-year-old and my four-year-old, seem to be going through growth spurts lately. They are just always hungry. It seems like my family’s food consumption has gone up a good deal just in the last few months as they’ve gotten a little bit bigger. So having things like this on hand when they get hungry between meals is really nice. I do find that I have to remind myself I love cooking from scratch. But I have to remind myself that this is an option, not a requirement. I don’t know if anyone else feels this way. All these things that I like to do like gardening and cooking and preserving can so quickly go from a joy to a chore. And so I’m trying to hold a personal policy that just because I can do something doesn’t mean I have to. My kids, like I said, are extra hungry right now. And so sometimes it’s going to be homemade muffins with garden fresh ingredients. And then sometimes it’s going to be store-bought granola bars depending on what season we’re in, what kind of time and energy I have. But today, I’m happy to be able to make these. And honestly, I’ll be happy for my kids to enjoy them. But I’m making them because I want to eat them today. [Music] I love this silicone baking tin because of how easy it is to get muffins and cupcakes out of it. Everything just pops out when I push from underneath. I need to buy some more of these. I have one, but I’d like to have a couple. I hope you’re doing well wherever you are. If you give these a try, let me know. Take care. Be well. [Music]