Fall garden work

Yesterday was a beautiful day (today is shaping up to be just as nice) so I spent the day outside in the yard.

I had decided I wanted to make my garden space a little larger. I decided to dig out some stupid peonies (or whatever they're called) and I wanted to move a couple of raised beds over to that area along our fence line. I took this opportunity to double dig the beds too since I was digging it up pretty well to get at the peony roots. Then I backfilled the raised beds with grass/leaf clippings from my mowing and then spread on the compost mix to hold it all down. Hopefully over the winter all the clippings will decompose and add matter to the beds and next spring I'll top coat the beds with compost and plant away. These beds are right next to the tomato area from this year which you can see on the right. Miraculously when I went out to the tomatoes yesterday morning to introduce them to the reaper I found about 2 dozen cherry/grape tomatoes on them so they currently have a reprieve in their forthcoming execution date.


I also decided that while I was doing this I might as well get started on the garden expansion. I decided to make a traditional garden area for the plants I have that are larger plants and take up a lot of space. This would be tomatoes, zucchinni, broccoli, squash, melons, etc. I marked out a general area that I wanted to make into this garden area and I cut out an outline with the shovel. Now I'm focusing on rounding up all the grass clippings, leaf clippings and any other stuff I can. My plan is to fill that area up with 3-5 inches of material. Over the next few months it should breakdown and add a nice base of material to the area as well as kill all the grass in that area. (Hopefully) Then next spring I plan to mix this material into the ground along with more compost and get going. I might put a tarp over it for the winter to keep it warmer in there so all the material will break down more quickly. I'm open for comments if you want to make suggestions, well, other than using a tiller to mix it all in. I plan to do it all by hand, although the way I feel today after the digging yesterday I think I'll need to stretch it out over a few days.

In the picture you can see the clippings from one day's mowing along with some of the leftover raised bed material from the beds I moved over against the fence. And if you look closely you can see the lines I cut out in the grass to mark the general outline of the garden area.


FGLB