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.