Epworth Veggie Garden

Today, we continued to cleanup the garden at Epworth. Removed some of the tomatoes from the wading pool gardens and also picked some of the orange cosmos that were pulled up last week. We will send a few tomatoes to the food pantry and we'll put some of the leaves and bad tomatoes in the compost pit. Temperatures are expected to be close to freezing this evening.

Maple Grove Cleanup

We began to cleanup the garden over at Maple Grove. The tomatoes are mostly done for the season. We decided that we'd make 2 different piles. One pile was mostly leaves and tomatoes. The second pile was stems and other items that would take too long to decay. We still have some cleanup work to do. Probably need to rake some and when the soil dries out a bit more we will do one final till. As usual we have waited too long to get a winter cover crop started.


There are still some peas and swiss chard growing.

Buckeye Lake Cleanup

Tonight, we began to clean up the garden out at Buckeye Lake. Some of the tasks planned for clean up include: storing the boards for the raised beds, moving the reusable soil into a temporary compost pit, raking up the wood chips, removing the weed fabric and putting away the fence for next year. We tried to sweep some of the soil off the boards for the raised beds. This wood is untreated, so we'd like to protect it a bit from the elements. Perhaps next year we will paint or stain these board. We always think about adding some wood chips to the compost pit, but it typically takes wood chips this size a while to break down and then as they break down they could rob the soil of nitrogen.


We haven't pulled up many of the plants because we wanted to save some of the leaves for the compost pile. We intend to build a more formal compost pit next year over at the new Tom Sawyer house. Tonight we just dumped everything in a big pile. We threw away the tomato plants, but saved the tomatoes and broccoli leaves for the compost pile. Over the past couple of weeks we have had a good time tossing the tomatoes all over the garden. The main goal was to toss the tomatoes into one of the empty raised beds so the tomatoes could start breaking down in the soil. Some times the tomatoes made it into the correct spot and other times...well... it got a little messy. We had lots of fun and it will all work out. We'll probably have some volunteer tomato plants next year. We'll see who can recognize the tomato plants when they pop up next year.

Garden Cleanup

We've started to clean up around the garden a bit. Several of the veggies are done for the season like beans, cucumbers and squash. Since we've harvested the last of the carrots and potatoes we've taken the board and are putting them away for the winter. We took the bent brackets and any remaining nails off the board and brushed the dirt off before putting them back in with the "scrap" wood. Most of the board will find their way back into the garden next season. Much of the soil that was in the raised beds will be raked back into the garden, have compost added and tilled in.

Grasshoppers and Slugs!

It's amazing the creatures you find in the garden if you take a minute or two to look. Some of the creatures are looking to eat and some are actually beneficial to the garden. The grasshopper above was found in the middle of the strawberries. Perhaps this type of grasshopper is a lubber grasshopper? Down south we always had big black and yellow grasshoppers we called Georgia Thumpers (I believe these are actually Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers) We've also been finding lots of slugs. With all the rain the slugs must be loving it! There have been slugs in the tomatoes and lots of other wet places. As we've moved some of the rocks we've seen slugs crawling all around looking for another dark wet place. I believe the slug shown below is a spotted garden slug? When I first can across this slug it really startled me because it reminded me of a rattlesnake.