I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
John Burroughs

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Preparing for winter...

October 25, 2022

Over the last few days, Mother Nature has blessed us with sublime warmth and sun, a reward for enduring close to a week of wet, grey days. It has been great weather for getting the garden beds ready for winter. Today is a little overcast and dawned foggily, but it is still fairly warm, and expected to go up to 20C (68F) later. Over the weekend and yesterday, the afternoon temperatures topped out at 23C (73F).


The leaves are mostly off all of the trees now, just the oaks

 
and beeches
 
 
still cling firmly to theirs.

 The trembling aspen leaves

seem reluctant to drop until a breeze wafts through and then they shower down like fat gold coins, carpeting the ground beneath the trees. 

With the last few dry days, the colourful leaves covering the trails, have dried and faded to brown,


 so now a walk through them is a noisy, crunchy business.

The garlic was planted a week or so ago,

and over the past few days, manure has been spread on the other beds, and my quota of mulching leaves for next summer has been collected, bagged and stored in the barn.

I just love my 'Yellow Beast'! Its makes short work of collecting all the leaves I need. (I reuse those industrial strength bags until they are in tatters.)
I dug out the crocosmia bulbs and rearranged them in the tire planter, so hopefully they will give me more blooms next summer.  It was obvious that the corms had spent a lot of their energy making babies instead of blooming! 

Asparagus ferns are cut and laid over that bed, a little more protection for the roots, until we get a blanket of snow. 

The strawberry bed has been dug out, replanted and mulched with some fresh straw I scored from a neighbour.



Hubby has reinforced the hardware cloth sides, and once the lids are put on next spring, I defy those striped vermin to get my berries!

The bed of greens and the broccoli patch soldier on, as we have not had a frost heavy enough to finish them yet. 


The winterberry bushes are loaded this fall, a vibrant pop of red colour.....lots of food for my feathered friends.
 

6 comments:

  1. What is the yellow beast? As a "collector" of fallen leaves for the garden, I'm always interested in finding an easier way to accomplish it.

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    1. Just a mower with a detachable bagger unit. I raise the deck up and mow over the leaves. It mulches them a bit and blows them into collection bins on the back, from whence I transfer them into bags for storage.

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  2. What a lovely description you've written both with you words and pictures! Just gorgeous.

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  3. Your garden looks really nice- well loved! And what a great idea for a bagger mower and fallen leaves. I usually just put my leaves in a big pile over winter, but they are always infested with ants by the time I need to use them for mulch the next summer.

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  4. Thank you Leigh, it is. The wind blows the leaves off into the bush, so it is best to get them from an 'easier to collect' area, and do it while the weather is conducive!

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