What a beautiful day to work in the garden today. The past several days have been so chilly that I haven't wanted to work outside. I had a load of mulch sitting in my side yard since the beginning of October.
I had the Fedoriw boys over to help. Matthew is 15 and Daniel is 8 and they are some hard working boys. They both love to garden and so I set them to work.
First they moved two truck loads of large rocks that were meant as a border around the flower beds. Since there is only grass in those beds, the rocks just got in the way of the lawn mower. Now the grass will fill in the gap and you will never know there were supposed to be flowers there at all.
Then we set to work on the mulch. I bought it as a soil amendment. Several years ago I had put up a mulched play area for my daughter but she never used it so I tilled it all under. The mulch decomposed and did wonders for my vegetables. I had zucchini and yellow squash coming out my ears. Anyway, I want to have the same problem next year. (I love zucchini and yellow squash)
Those boys worked hard and fast. They brought around mulch in buckets and spread it on my beds faster than I could dig it in. I had already started on one of my raised beds back when I first got the mulch but didn't get to any of the others. I dug more into that same one and dug up two more today. I still have two more to do.
We pulled up the last of the peppers and tomatoes in my raised beds. I can't believe that I still had flowers on the pepper plant and probably two dozen or more tomatoes still on the vine. Well, the tomatoes I can believe. I generally pull up my tomatoes well before they die. I just get so overrun with them that I don't know what to do with them all.
Don't get me wrong, I love tomatoes. There just comes a time at the end of the season that you just don't want to see another tomato. I let mine self seed. That is, I let the fruit fall off and stay there over the winter. I generally get very strong, very hardy plants the next year. There are some cherry tomatoes that have been coming back for three years now.
I had originally wanted to mulch all the way around the house where the flower beds are but I know that I will never have enough time to do flowers. Apparently my green thumb only applies to vegetable gardening because as much as I love colorful flowers, they always die.
So now that I am only mulching the raised vegetable beds, I had way to much mulch. Twice as much as I could use. So the boys loaded as much as would fit in the back of the truck to take home with them.
Fall isn't necessarily the best time for decorative mulching but if they keep it covered maybe their mother will have some for next spring. I think Matthew may use some on his garden. He has a nice size plot and is planning some raised beds for next year. I hope it goes well for him.
Thank you boys, you did a great job today. We did all of that in probably two hours.
