Fall Garden Work

It's right in the middle of fall where I live, so I've been trying to get my fall garden work done. That work was held up by about a week of rainy days, but the past several days have been pretty nice, so I've finally been able to get some of my fall work done.

Most of the fall work is basically preparing the garden for winter by cleaning up all the remaining mess in the garden and then mulching the garden to prepare for the next growing season. The first thing that I had to do was to finish digging the potatoes. I had 4 rows left to dig, and I finally got them all done. The harvest wasn't all that great, but I did get some decent size potatoes, along with a lot of small ones.

Once I finished the digging, I was able to rake out the dirt somewhat to flatten it a bit, to prepare for the mulch. Then I dragged my chipper/shredder out to the end of the garden and positioned it for shredding leaves onto the garden.

Our back yard maple tree is still holding most of it's leaves, but the neighbor's tree turned bright orange and has been shedding leaves for more than a week. He's been spending a lot of time with his leaf blower moving all the leaves out to the curb. It didn't take me too long to figure out that I could go across the street with a couple of empty garbage cans and a rake and scoop up a bunch of leaves to shred. I started shredding leaves yesterday afternoon, and ended up running 12 garbage cans full of leaves through the machine.

I ended up with a fairly thick layer of shredded leaves down the middle of the garden. I'm going to need to shred lot more leaves still because I have 2 gardens to cover. Maple leaves really add a lot to the soil of the garden, and they decompose faster if they're shredded. I'll till them into the garden next spring with the rototiller.

I also have some corn stalks to run through the shredder to add back into the soil, but I have to pull the corn stalks out of the garden first. I may not get to them until the end of October.
I'm also going to move some of the shredded leaves up to my plots at the local community garden. Those plots can use the extra mulch, it's always good to keep the earthworms fed.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!