The State of My Garden

In a word...scary.  Seriously.  Take a look.  Would you want to walk in here?

I certainly haven't wanted to in quite some time and it shows.  I'm afraid of what I might scare up.  I startled a little bunny rabbit last week and I also saw a beautiful Western garner snake.  But I'm not sure what other sinister critters may be hiding out in this mess.  I only have one garden bed that is still growing stuff and that's my sweet potato bed.  And I peeked in there a couple of days ago and oh my goodness, will I have sweet potatoes!  But that's for another post :)

The current state of my garden is also very embarrassing for me.  I have Never.Ever. let my garden get so overgrown and messy.  I still can't believe it looks so bad.  But this summer, it has just been too darn hot to get out there and work it.  And it still is.  It was 99 degrees yesterday...and it's the end of September for crying out loud!

Anyway, I have been procrastinating long enough.  It's time I did something to clean up this mess and get my garden back!  And I've also done something else I've never done before concerning my garden.  I actually hired a crew to clean it out.

It pains me to admit this.  I've always taken great pride in my garden, in how productive and beautiful it is (usually), and in doing all the work myself.  But I finally admitted to myself that I needed help.  And look what they've done!

They cleaned out all the beds

mowed all the weeds down to the ground,  laid a weed mat around the entire garden floor and put down a 6-inch layer of mulch, turned over all the soil in all the beds and spread a bag and half of compost I had laying around.  I was out there yesterday morning before they finished the job and couldn't believe how much better it looked already!

Of course the puppies were very curious as to what this was all about...not to mention all these great new smells!  It was also a treat for them because my garden is usually off limits.

And see what it looks like now!  I have my beautiful garden queendom back! 

Many thanks to Mark and his crew for all their hard work!

Harry and I leave in a couple of days for two weeks in Paris and Holland.  When we get back, all I have to do is add some compost to a few beds and plant my fall and winter garden.  Yay!  I'm anxious to get back into my garden.  I've really missed it these past couple of months.  I'm also anxious to get back to blogging.  I've missed that and y'all too!  Of course, I probably lost a lot of you guys too during my lil break :/

Thank you all for your patience and encouraging words in my last two posts.  Hopefully, I will be back online by the middle of October.  Until then, bon voyage! :)

Gorgeous Compost

We gardeners get excited about the strangest things...like a pile of composted horse manure and pine shavings!  But seriously, only a gardener would think it's even remotely cool to write about something like this...much less post pictures...and then actually think people would care!  But look at this stuff...to a gardener, this is like gold!

My wonderful friend Shelly has a gorgeous mare named Izzy, short for Giselle. Shelly invited me out to the barn where she boards Izzy to pick up some manure compost for my garden.  I jumped at the chance!  Yesterday morning, I went out there and hauled back three big contractor bags full of this stuff.
 

It's been sitting in the hot sun for about six months and it is completely composted and the perfect mulch for my garden.  Yesterday afternoon I spread it on three of my beds and watered it thoroughly.  My beds look beautiful!

Maybe it will help my struggling peppers :/

 

And this stuff is full of good nutrients for my soil and is better than anything I can buy in a bag.  And the good thing is there is plenty more where this came from!

And here is the beautiful Izzy who helped contribute to this pile of organic love for my garden :)

 

 Thanks Shelly!

Garden At Rest

Winter is upon us and it's time for me to put my garden to rest.  There weren't very many vegetables left out there so I decided to pick them all, turn off the sprinkler system and mulch all the beds for the season.  We are expecting three to four days of frigid temperatures and what's left out there will freeze and I'll lose it anyway. 

 

I wanted to introduce the puppies to the garden but still maintain control over them and their activities because the central theme of their training is I control everything.  So I brought their beds outside, tethered the pups to the outside of the garden fence, put a bowl of water between them and gave each of them a brand new pig snout to chew on.  They were pretty happy!

 Laci

 Going to town on the pig snout!

 Gretchen having a good time too!

 From inside the garden fence

Once I got the pups settled, I went to work.  I picked all the carrots.  To my surprise, there were still quite a few out there.  At least enough for one more meal.  They weren't very big, but baby carrots are quite sweet and yummy!

Next, I picked all the beets.  Again, these were tiny but roasted baby beets are one of my favorite side dishes.  I have a salad of Endive and Roasted Baby Beet with Gorgonzola Cheese planned for dinner one night this week.  Can't wait for that! 

I picked the last of the cabbage a few weeks ago so I pulled all the stems and threw some of the cabbage leaves over the fence to the deer and some went in the compost bin. 

There is only one small broccoli plant left in the garden that is still growing, but there were lots of little shoots coming off the six spent stalks.  So I picked all of those and it actually equaled quite a good bunch of baby broccoli florets . 

I had two Brussels sprouts plants left and again, the sprouts were small, but there was a good bunch once I picked them all.

I had a large bale of very decomposed hay left over from 2009's Christmas decorations, so I used that to mulch all the beds.  I'm hoping this hay cover will keep the soil somewhat moist and encourage lots of earth worms to grow.  Actually, I did see many earth worms as I was pulling plants and turning soil over.  That's always a very good thing. 

So I spread all the hay evenly over the beds and I had just enough to do all six garden beds. 

I had one head of broccoli left out there that was still growing and it has a little head beginning to form.  Since I hate to pull plants that are still growing and have a chance to produce, I left that one there and just mulched it really well.  Either it will survive the coming cold weather or it won't.  But I wanted to give it its best shot.  And I'll let Mother Nature decide that one. 

I feel the same way about my green onions.  They got a late start due to lack of sunshine but have begun to sprout.  So I mulched them really well and we'll just see what happens.

At the end of the day, I had a pretty good last haul of vegetables from my garden.  I'm very happy that I was able to pull all this before the freezing temperatures hit us.  There's at least four good meals sitting here and for me, that is what it's all about.

After a very long hard (but wonderful) day in the garden, reflecting on how my fall/winter garden produced for me this year, I'm pretty content.  We had many good meals shared with family and good friends and the deer that live outside my fence line ate pretty well too :-}  Life is good.