Putting It To Bed

Tiller waiting repairs and fall servicing before being put to bed

Despite my fall crop of peas I am planting to try and make up for the peas that ripened while I was away in the Philippines back in June, my garden is now done and/or we are done with it. Let me explain.

We still had tomatoes and peppers but the tomatoes are few are far between now as the plants are mostly dead and haven't been flowering for a long time. The peppers we are just tired of dealing with them. There are only so many peppers one can eat in their diet before you grow tired of them. So on a particular nice day a couple weeks back, I decided to put the garden to bed. Removing the electrified net fence while not difficult, does take me probably an hour to remove and put back up so it not something I want to do frequently. So I took it down and decided to accomplish all the garden work I wanted to do until next spring before putting it back up.

With the netting down, I removed all the tomato and pepper plants and added them to my compost pile. With the garden now clear, except for my fall pea crop with pods that haven't yet filled out, I decided now would be a great time to till it. It would kill all the weeds that have crept in, even out the areas where we dug up our root crops and work the mulch into the soil to slowly decay over winter. It also breaks up the mulch so that the soil will dry out a bit faster in the spring allowing us to get things planted a bit earlier.

I got the tiller started but when I moved the throttle, the lever moved too easily and the motor instead of speeding up, slowed down to something barely idling. A quick investigation showed that the throttle cable had broken somewhere along it's length and the business end being spring driven, choked the engine speed down to something sounding like a 2 cylinder tractor on a cold morning. So after 15 or so minutes of poking and trying various things, I was able to locate a bungee cord that I used to hold the throttle wide open so that I could get the garden tilled and then did so. Replacing the throttle cable is now on my near term to do list as soon as I can get one ordered and delivered. On a positive note, I saw the squirming remains of at least four or five voles that got tilled up in the process. Perhaps next year any survivors will consider moving someplace else.

With the spent plants removed and the garden tilled, it looks so much better but before I can officially put it to bed for the winter, I have to get my garlic planted. so I got my bag of garlic that I picked in July and sorted through it selecting the biggest and best formed heads to use and separated them into individual cloves. I probably harvested 100 bulbs of garlic in July but am planting closer to 200 cloves for next year that will hopefully form 200 bulbs of garlic. So in my third year, I hope to be up to full production after starting the year planting I think 4 bulbs of garlic that I had purchased. I got the garlic planted where it will start putting down roots and settling in for the winter.

With that done, I put up the fence again and got it hooked up to electricity, at least until the peas are picked at which point I will unhook it again until spring. My garden is now officially done and I can relax until late winter when I start getting the urge again to start sorting through seed catalogs and planning out what we will plant next year. Hopefully before then I'll get my tiller fixed and ready to go.

Garden now ready to sleep for the winter, post fall pea harvest.