Thursday marked the first day of fall, and along with it comes fall yard clean up and preparing your yard and garden for another Manitoba Winter.

"It is upon us in a big way and it's amazing with how fast it comes. Labour day weekend it was warm up till Saturday and then it was fall," said Lawn and Garden Journal Host Duane Friesen.

Friesen noted this is the second busiest time of year for gardening. He noted its not only the time to prepare your yard for another Manitoba winter, but it's an opportune time to plant and or transplant flowers.

"This is the best time to do it and people are catching on to that," said Friesen. "It's so much less stress on your plants. The plants take off for you next year. There's very little work you have to do once they are planted, because they are going dormant so you don't have to water as much and the ground is still warm, which promotes good rooting. There's more of that happening, more than ever. You can also take advantage of sales at the garden centre to get your gardens planted."

He also noted it's a great time to work on your soil, because its generally drier and easier to work with. This will allow you to work ahead for the spring time.

Fertilization of the lawn should be done in the summer months, not in the fall according to Friesen.

"With today's laws and types of fertilizers that we are allowed to use on our lawns. I'd say don't do it. Generally what you are doing with a fall fertilizer is it replaces or pushes back your first fertilizing in spring. It's there to strengthen the root system of your plants and aide in over wintering," said Friesen. "We were using fertilizer that has phosphorous in it at that time, because you wanted it to work on the root system and it also helped with the over wintering. Now we can't have phosphorous in our fertilizers for lawn. The fertilizers that we have left are really high in nitrogen, and we don't want to put that on in the fall."

Meanwhile, to give your lawn a head start, when the temperatures start to warm up you can fertilize it around the first weekend in May.