Tidying Up for Winter

This weekend we got out to do our last garden chores of the 2011 season. From here on out, we'll only be harvesting — and precious little of that, since it got so cold. The entire day we were working on Sunday, it never got beyond 35 degrees, and the wind chill was only in the 20s. That's about when it stops being fun to be outside doing anything other than sledding or pond skating, if you ask me.

The first thing we did was to finally patch up the bricks around this driveway fence post:

Although that section of fence has been re-installed for almost a full five months now, we only filled the bricks in around the gap on Saturday afternoon. I'm not sure why we kept putting it off (although it might have had something to do with my vow never to pick up another brick as long as I live), but it wasn't very hard to do. Anyway, we got them in before the ground freezes and (possibly) heaves, so I guess it's all good. And that is officially the last brick laid.

We also took down the pea trellises, leaving only the cold frames with some salad greens:

Those vines had all died back quite some time ago, so we finally dismantled the frame and netting and packed them up in the garage to wait for March or April. The vines themselves went into the new compost bins in the back:

This area is lookin' gooood. I know it's brown and plain, but it's so clean and neat now, and therefore I love it. We even set up the decrepit old concrete bench by the tree. I don't think it will stay there forever, because it seems odd that someone would want to sit in the less-than-scenic utility yard near the compost and (eventual) chicken coop. But it's heavy, so that's where it will stay over the winter.

We also dismantled one of the greenhouse hoops. Early Sunday morning the low temperature was 19 degrees, so that did in what was left of our cilantro. The lettuce was pretty much gone anyway, and Kirk pulled the carrots that were in there. We also trimmed back the (finally) dying-back mint, leaving us with a bare bed:

The green bits are the tops of dormant perennial herbs, so cilantro and lettuce stems that broke off with the roots still underground, and some weeds. We'll give this all a good turning over in the spring, but this is how it will rest for the winter.

So what's left? Well, Kirk cut down the PVC pipes on the greenhouse hoops to make them shorter. This means that we have more plastic on the ground to keep the cover secure, so hopefully it will stop blowing off every time it gets a little windy. We kept the brussels sprouts covered (above), because every time we look we swear they are just a bit bigger than last time. We also kept the broccoli in the hoop below:

As with the Brussels sprouts, we can't bring ourselves around to the idea that the broccoli is quite done growing, and we are hoping to harvest additional side shoots for a little while longer. This may be foolish now that we've had two very cold nights (upper teens) in a row, and perhaps we'll realize later this week that we should have cut our losses by bringing those things in this weekend instead of gambling on them any further. Still, without testing their limits, we won't know for next year how long to give them, so we soldier on in the spirit of the experimental year that we told ourselves we were having. Next year will be the real deal, and we'll be ready.