Jeff and I worked hard on the garden clean up today. I didn't take a picture before we started working, but you can imagine all the dead tomato plants, eggplants, peppers, etc. Some of the things I'd previously mowed down with the tractor or cut down, like the sunflowers. All the stakes were still in place.
We started out by pulling up stakes and moving the bricks off the plastic mulch. The bricks hold the mulch down in the wind, which we get plenty of around here.
It is a workout bending, lifting and lugging all these twice a year!
We are as gentle as possible with the plastic mulch so we can use it from year to year. We have 7 good sheets to store in the barn for next year.
The green hoses and these drip lines all get coiled and stored in the barn.
Jeff found a self sown pea plant when we were cleaning. And you can see I started the day with pretty, dark blue nails, but they got terribly chipped by the end, even with my work gloves on.
Here's how it looked with the plastic and hoses removed. There are two large burn piles at the far end of the garden.
A view from the second floor of the barn. If you look closely, you can see Jeff tilling.
While Jeff tilled, I mowed the lawn and ran over a lot of leaves to chop and mulch them.
But you can see we have a lot of raking in our future still. The trees seem to really be hanging onto the leaves this year. They are still quite pretty, especially with the low sunlight filtering through them.
All this lovely dirt almost makes me want to sow some seeds! But I will be glad of the break from trying to keep up with everything growing so fast. I will wait 'til spring when it's time to put in the peas again.
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