We turned off our irrigation system to the yard, and the one to the garden a few weeks ago because of threatened freezes. It always makes me a bit sad because things start to wilt almost immediately when we do.
Our elephant ear plants did really well this year, giving us many hours of pleasure. They are looking quite sad right now. As soon as they are completely down, leaves brown and hanging down, I’ll cut them off as close to the soil surface as possible and lay thick layers of mulch as tightly as I can to see if they’ll over winter in place this time, as digging them up and storing them in the garage in peat moss last year was unsuccessful.
We had kind of a weird growing season this time. Our lettuce did well, giving us lots of nice salads. Our spinach was nice, too. Then things warmed up really quickly, causing all my spring garden to bolt at once. We had nice tomatoes, but due to the weather changes, they weren’t ‘pretty’ this year. Thankfully, our stomachs don’t care about that a bit! :0) This is the way we winter over our raised bed, square foot garden. I carefully weeded, then topped off the 4’x4′ wooden boxes with fresh Mel’s Mix (peat moss, vermiculite, and 3 kinds of compost (I used mushroom, barnyard, and cotton). Hopefully, I won’t have a whole lot to do to prepare the boxes for planting in the spring. I’m already itching to get the plants in as soon as they are available.
I’m going to start getting serious about pruning flower planters and readying things for winter very soon.
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