Packing It In

My wife and I made one more quick trip down to the garden before calling it good for the winter. With a new storage facility back at our house on the edge of town, I am going to take over lawn care duties starting in the spring and so picked up a battery operated weed eater to help in that regard. I wanted to try it out and so brought it with me. It made quick work of the weeds around the strawberry beds and underneath the old apple tree. Above is what we refer to as our berry patch which is in the remains of our original orchard where only three decrepit trees remain. Hopefully in the near future there will be strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and grapes growing there.

The north end of our east garden was really wet for much of last year and probably a reason why the popcorn crop didn't do all that well. So more soil was added to it to build it up to allow for better drainage. Hopefully that will fix the problem.

Above is our new orchard now on the other end of the garden area. All told, we planted six fruit trees, this year and three survived the very wet spring we had. The three that died though have a guarantee and will replaced in the spring when new stock has been obtained. The three pears that we planted in late summer however seemed to be doing well before the cold snap caused them to lose their leaves. 

 Our arched trellis was a big success, so much so, we would like to expand our wire support program in our garden. Next year we are looking to obtain some more wire "hog panels" and fence posts to create a place for our peas and beans to climb. We probably won't form them in an arch and will keep these more temporary so we can rotate their location in the garden. Since the vines were all long dead, we pulled them down to make room for next year's crop and piled them next to the asparagus bed where we will burn them along with the asparagus bed in late winter. Now all that is left is to dream and flip through seed catalogs until spring.