#1 Fall Clean-up

              We just finished putting the garden away. Some people would call this the end of the gardening season. We prefer to call it the start of the season (remember, I am gardening with a madman). Everything we are going to talk about is preparing the garden for the coming season.

Getting Ready for Spring    

          We cleaned up all the planting beds, removed old plants and garden debris to make it more difficult for pests and diseases to overwinter. We hope there won’t be any bad elements waiting in the spring to make a fresh start. Last season we had an especially bad experience with squash bugs so we were most diligent in that part of the garden. Remember, you don’t care how great everyone else’s plants look if you are hit by an infestation of something.

            We added compost and some chicken manure (courtesy of Patti Krell at Krell Farms) to some of the beds. We are getting ready for a soil test – we recommend you get your soil tested yearly by your local county extension service. We’ll take samples from several garden areas and send it off to UConn. If we tell them what we plan to grow, they will give recommendations for soil amendments – no thinking involved, the madman particularly likes this.

Last Call for Planting          

              Before the soil froze we planted our garlic bulbs – lots of them. When Tad harvests hundreds of bulbs in the summer, people think, “Yep, he is a madman.” But actually, we use garlic as a pest deterrent. The madman is allergic to cats, the best rodent deterrent on the planet, so unfortunately we are plagued by the little critters. During harvest, we had been noticing little bites in about half of our root crops. Grr-r-r. Then the madman heard that burrowing animals don’t like the allium family. We found that ringing the garden beds with garlic, onions, and chives cut down on the pre-harvest sampling. Hence, we have garlic all over the place. This keeps a lot of people happy – if you are in the Farmington area, stop on by for a clove or two.

            Garlic isn’t the only bulb we have planted all over the place; we have planted lots of spring flowering bulbs-there is no sight quite so welcoming as an aconite blooming in the midst of a snow drift. When the thaw comes next spring we will delight in cruising our yard looking for the first signs of plant life.

Storing the Pots        

           The last task we just completed is the worst (according to the madman) – we cleaned, sorted and stored all our pots. Since we grow a lot of our own seeds, we will need a variety of sizes as the growing season progresses. We also do a lot of container gardening so the number of pots is staggering. But, they are now all safely stored in the shed – upside-down with mothballs to prevent our friends the rodents from nesting (something we learned the hard way). We are also now experimenting with mothballs all over and around our power equipment since the nasty critters built a nest in the lawnmower and ate the ignition wires of the rototiller. Madman was not happy when he discovered this.

            The madman just made a large pot of cocoa so I guess it is time to rest for now.