Simple Steps to Spring Garden Cleanup + Free Checklist

Use these easy early, mid, and late spring garden cleanup tasks and tips to get your garden ready for summer. Plus, print out the free checklist to help keep you organized by month. Your garden will thank you with blooms and growth!

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Are you feeling the gardening itch yet as winter turns to spring? I know I am. I’ve enjoyed the winter garden break, dreamed and planned, and now I’m ready to go.

No matter where you live, sometime in March, April, or May is the time for a spring garden cleanup – and starting as early as you can means less work later on (I speak from so.much.experience of not doing the early cleanup when I should!). Taking care of dead branches before trees leaf out, pulling small perennial spring weeds, and covering all the small new annual weeds before they get big (best thing ever!) means more time to enjoy what you love about gardening later on: planting and harvesting your flowers and vegetables, and soaking in the view.

When to start your spring cleanup?

We all have different general zones based on where we live (find your garden zone around the world here) as well as your own local, garden specific zone (which may be a bit different if your garden is in a valley, etc.). Obviously, you’ll need to wait if you still have snow and freezes, but you’ll also want to wait if the soil is really wet. Your soil will thank you – and your spring garden will still be waiting for it’s cleanup when the weather allows.

What I look for are signs of new green growth of the plants, warmer weather in the forecast, and my calendar. Any amount of time you have is that much more you won’t need to do later. And I love getting out in those first days of warmer sunshine in the spring! Grab a bucket and trim, weed, or prune for 30 minutes and check that area/task off your list.

To make getting your spring garden ready as easy as possible for you, I’ve created a simple garden cleanup checklist you can download, a video, and more information on each task with tips below.

Spring Garden Cleanup Free Checklist

The tasks are broken down into early, mid, and later spring to-dos to help you spread them out. TIP: Print out the checklist, slip it into a sheet protector, and take it into the garden with you. Then keep it in your gardening notebook journal.

Spring Cleanup Video

Early Spring Garden Tasks

1. Prune Trees, Shrubs, and Roses

• Remove dead and damaged branches from trees and shrubs. Prune tree branches back to the trunk using a handsaw for branches larger than ½ inch in diameter (the Fiskars Extendable Pole Saw Pruner we used worked perfect for higher branches). Use sharp bypass pruners for shrubs and small trees, shaping as you go.
• Trim overgrown evergreens. Cut back to the branch whose direction you want to encourage; use hedge trimmers on plants like boxwood, arborvitae, and yews.
• Prune fruit trees you didn’t get to in winter. TIP: prune before buds begin to break into bloom or you’ll stress the tree.

• Trim established summer-flowering shrubs. Examples are butterfly bushes, spireas, caryopteris, forsythias, and crape myrtles. (Wondering how? Read how to prune with confidence here.) Leave any spring-flowering shrubs until early summer when they’re finished flowering for the season. Loppers like this make this job easier.
• Roses – the earlier the better. Cut back winter-damaged or diseased rose canes to 1 inch below the blackened area. On climbers, keep younger green canes and remove older woody ones. Use loppers on any large canes or bypass pruners like these on smaller canes.

2. Maintain Paths, Structures and Irrigation

• Check the soakers, drip lines or irrigation systems – are they working? Covering the area? Watering the roots?
• Inspect and clean decks, wood arbors, and fences, making repairs as needed.
• Refresh gravel or wood chips in paths.
• Check stonework for frost heaves.

3. Prep the Vegetable Beds

• Remove any vegetable debris from the previous season.
• Rake on new layer of compost and seed with any hardy vegetables that will grow in your zone.
• Cover waiting beds with black plastic to kill weeds with solar heat (so easy!).

4. Divide Perennials (only when soil has thawed)

• Dig and divide perennials before the plants have started their spring growth.
• 3 year and older daylilies and hostas especially benefit from dividing.

Mid Spring Garden Tasks

1. Clean and Prep Beds and Borders

• Pull dead plants and remove fallen leaves and dead foliage which can smother plants and foster disease then compost the leaves. TIP: If leaves are small and starting to compost, you can work it into the top layer of the soil around the plants.
• Push any frost-heaved plants back into flower beds, tamping them down around the base with your foot.
• Loosen the mulch and other dried plant matter covering the ground around your plants to allow water and air to the roots.
• Edge along beds to refresh the lines and keep grass from growing into them.

2. Remove Early Large Weeds and Perennial Weeds

• Dig out all the perennial weeds you can see with a trowel (or shovel for larger infested areas), like tap-rooted dandelions and invasive violets.
• Leave the smaller weeds! To clean up a yard full of weeds the easy way, after removing the perennial weeds, simply cover the rest with newspaper or cardboard and mulch.

3. Apply Mulch

Using a paper-and-mulch system to easily cover up small spring weeds now means you’ll have almost no weeding come summer!

TIP: Applying organic mulch on top of your garden is the single most important thing you can do for your garden every year. It prevents weeds, regulates soil temperature, retains moisture, and improves soil structure. On my established garden beds, organic mulch is the only form of fertilizer I use and my plants are healthy and lovely.

4. Lawn Care

• Seed bare spots as needed.
• Apply spring fertilizer.

Late Spring Garden Tasks

1. Continue Mulching

• Cover all areas of your garden for even moisture for the plants and less weeding for you is a win-win.

2. Deadhead Spring Bulbs

• Remove spent blossoms from spring flowering bulbs.
• Let the foliage die back before removing it, too.

3. Prune Spring Flowering Shrubs

• Trim spent blooms of shrubs like butterfly bushes, spireas, caryopteris, forsythias and crape myrtles.
• If needed, thin out overly thick branches to rejuvenate older plants.

Working through a spring garden cleanup list like this can keep you on track and help you to know what task to tackle and when. The result is a yard and garden ready to be enjoyed all season long with happy, thriving plants. That’s the goal – let’s encourage one another to get out there and do it!

This article has been updated, it was originally published in 2017.

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