Leaving It On the Field

Finally getting a hard frost has finally made it easier to clean out the Stoddart Avenue Community Garden for the season.  It’s always heartbreaking – even impossible – to pull out a beautiful vegetable that is still green and bushy.  However, pulling out a plant with slimy or dead leaves is par for the course for this point in the gardening season.  And the hard frost means that our kale has gone from tasting bitter, to tasting sweet.  On Saturday, the SACG had seven volunteers come and help clean out the garden a week in advance of our traditional closing day on the second Saturday in November.

I picked up donuts and apple cider on Friday for the volunteers and Cathy baked a couple dozen chocolate chip cookies.  When I arrived (ten minutes late), Carly was there weeding the strawberry  patch. She had planned to visit her parents in Iowa over the three-day weekend next week, so she wanted to make up early missing our Closing Day work day next week.   Alyssa and Taylor pulled in right behind me.  They are heading to Canada for the three-day weekend.  They then spent most of the morning pruning the raspberry brambles on the outside of the fence and along the food pantry plots inside to about knee height, and then bagging all of the brambles.  This is dangerous work because of all of the thorns and the Garden looks completely different without our thorny fence rows.

James Brown may have been the busiest man in show business, but Robert Seed  -- the volunteer coordinator for Keep Columbus Beautiful -- is the busiest man in Central Ohio beautification.  He showed up again to help clean out the Garden before running off to his next engagement in Franklinton.  I gave him a few options and he chose to mow our lawn for the first time in about a month, and then he picked up a bunch of litter in the neighborhood before grabbing a few cookies and hitting the road.

Neighbor Rose wanted to join the party, so I asked her to clean out Joy’s plot and told her that she could keep any salvageable produce that she found along with some of Rachel’s lettuce. This took her most of the morning and she ultimately donated most of the produce that she found (although I think that she left some carrots in the ground when they didn’t pull easily).

While I cut back the leaning and dead cosmos flowers, harvested leeks, peppers and kale for our weekly food pantry donation, cut out weed trees, and cut back the brambles along my fence row in my plot, Sabrina arrived and basically cleaned out the rest of the area.  She cleaned out the summer neighbor bed (of spent cucumbers, peppers and cherry tomatoes), the raised beds and the African marigolds growing in the food pantry plots.  We ended up exhausting our entire supply of yard waste bags, so I hope that I am able to find some at Lowe’s later today.  One year, all of the home improvement stores ran out and I had to buy them (at twice the cost) at Target.

We always find surprises when cutting back the brambles.  This year we found two birds' nests (one of which was in my plot) and I found two praying mantis egg nests.

After they finished cutting back brambles, Allyssa and Taylor worked on cleaning out their plot.  We can keep hardy vegetables in our plots beyond Closing Day because some of us keep coming back for small harvests for several more weeks.   They had experimented with blue potatoes this year, but those suckers  -- like all potatoes  -- take a lot of space and are difficult to find -- particularly when they match the soil.  They were still  trying to find all of their potatoes and also found more sweet potatoes when they decided to thin and transplant some of their bok choy and arugula. 

All of us have been disappointed with our Fall pea crop.  It was just too warm too long for them to flourish like they usually do.  I have only harvested 4 pea pods so far this year, but they are still flowering . . . .  Rachel's the only one who had luck with a Fall lettuce crop.  It's been a long and strange trip this Fall.

One of our mysteries, though, was that someone emptied our large rain cistern.  I had planned to empty half of it yesterday and the other half next week.  But when I arrived, it was bone dry.  I hope that it has not sprung a leak.  No one would take responsibility for having drained it early.  As a result, when Alyssa transplanted some of her winter crops, she had no water with which to water them in.  Sigh.

When I say that we are “pulling plants,” we are really just cutting the stems to the ground.  We try to leave the bottom of the stem and the complete root system in tact in order to feed the soil microbes and hold the soil in place over the winter.  Unless the garden gets covered with a blanket of snow, leaving our soil exposed over the winter means that some of it will blow away during winter storms. I probably have to return sometime today to rake debris off my plot, though, to keep bugs from overwintering under dead leaves.  I thought/hoped that the hard frost had killed all of the harlequin beetles (that have killed about half of our kale and collards), but I saw some return in the afternoon.  Nothing except rain and insecticidal soap seems to kill aphids.

Next week, we still have a lot to accomplish to close the SACG for the season:

1)      Prune the remaining flowers, including the pansies and salvia and butterfly bush.  I can never decide whether to cut back the cone flowers because I like to leave their seed heads to feed the birds over the winter, but I also do not want to leave a mess for our neighbors to look at.  We will leave the pansies and mums behind.

2)      Harvest the rest of the kale, collard greens, chard, lettuce, cilantro, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, and possibly carrots and cabbage (which have not really matured yet) for our final food pantry donation for the season and cut those plants back to the ground.  (I think there’s a song in there somewhere . . . .)

3)      Empty and turn over the rain barrel behind the shed.

4)      Cut back the mint up front and dig up and bag as much as the chocolate mint that we can growing in the path and food pantry plot.

5)      Clean out the area around the shed, and reorganize the stakes, cages and trellises.

6)      Clean out and reorganize the shed.

7)      Turn the compost bins (i.e., shovel it from one bin into the other to promote decomposition and the formation of compost

8)      Take down and store the sign for the season.

9)  Clean and winterize our lawn mower (if Ken comes to help).

We are scheduled to start at 9 am, but Sabrina suggested that we start at 8.  I can't imagine starting that early (even with the time change), but now that I know that the MSU game starts at noon, I'd like to start at 8:30 if we don't receive any strong objections. . . .

Of course, we will have refreshments.  Many hands make light work.  The more, the merrier are welcome.