Friday marked the last gasp of my veggie garden. (Well, almost). We still had freshly-picked snow peas and broccoli for Thanksgiving dinner, and I picked another three pounds of Brussels sprouts over the weekend. But by early this week the thermometer was showing 20 degrees. Time to quit while we were ahead.
I don't try to re-cycle all my yard waste at this time of year either. My plants did a pretty good job at keeping bugs and diseases at bay all season. I don't want to give the critters a head start for next year. The exceptions are my snow peas. Besides being legumes and binding nitrogen into the soil they have seldom brought unwanted problems into the garden. I chop them up and till them right in.
Meanwhile, the composter to which I had stopped adding a few weeks ago has now done part of its job and is ready to contribute to the winter garden as well.
So the compost, the snow peas and a nice layer of oak leaves have been tilled into the soil as the garden surface loses its raised beds and reverts to a flat surface.
...Or most of it has. My parsley bed for some reason still looks gorgeous, so it is sitting there as a 3 foot by 5 foot emerald patch in a chocolate-brown bed. And we are once more experiencing a "heat" wave of highs in the 60's. This time our patch's lease on life will depend on what we can still fit in the freezer. We fixed a bunch of tabbouleh last week and will make some more tomorrow. We are also freezing some more parsley pesto sauce for winter pasta. And this year I finally realized that we can also freeze Argentine chimichurri sauce for all the meat we will be grilling this winter.
Fortunately, our freezer is not that big, so the garden really will be put to bed this week. By now some of you must be sighing with relief. So am I. Time to give some of my tools a rest.
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