Fall                                                                                Samhain Moon

While picking raspberries this afternoon, I looked at the garden beds we cleared this week. There is the suntrap where we had all those tiny tomatoes and the two plants of huge heirloom Brandywines and Cherokee Purples.  The asparagus bed, the little mound still tufted with the green of asparagus stalks, got over taken this year by the exuberant ground cherries that grew and grew and grew and would still be growing if we hadn’t decided enough and pulled them.

South of the suntrap is the first bed in the vegetable garden, one made of logs, made long enough ago by Jon that I’ve had to replace the logs around it already at least once.  This year it had sugar snap peas, cucumbers, egg plants, broccoli, and hot peppers.  It’s had many crops over the 16 or so years its been in place.

Next to it is a bed that we’d given over to dicentra and bugbane because of the wonderful ash tree we allowed to grow large in the garden.  They’re shade lovers.  This year, with the emerald ash borer coming and a long standing desire to open up more sun in the garden, we had the ash taken down and planted this bed with its first vegetable crop in years:  yellow tomatoes and yellow peppers.  They thrived.

When Jon originally built the raised beds, I asked him to be creative, mix up the shapes and the materials.  The first one he tried was made of tin roofing.  It worked ok, but he preferred working with 2×4’s after that.  Now it’s half daisy.  The other half this year had a productive small tomato plant and couple of so-so pepper plants.  I made one obvious mistake.  I planted a pepper to the west of the tomato plant and it never thrived.

The long bed, the extra large bed, this year had beets and carrots, a couple of crops.  It also has a persistent asian lily crop that comes from the short time I used the beds as cutting gardens.  After treating the lilies as weeds (a plant out of place), they have become confined (mostly) to the extreme south end of the bed.

To the east of the extra large bed are two similar sized beds.  The north one this year had onions and garlic and the southern bed had beets (didn’t do well) and greens (which did).  The leeks are in the long mound west of the extra large bed, doing well, still growing.

Our raspberry patch is up against the fence and behind the wisteria.  Its growth has shaded out a small bed that this year had only a crop of asian lilies.  North of it is the strawberry bed and north of that the herb spiral.

The beds we cleared are the ones on which I broadcast fertilizer last week and they’re now mulched, extra large and two similar sized ones, or awaiting mulch from this year’s leaf fall.  These beds are brown, bare of plant material for the first time since May.  They look bereft, but they’re not.  In the top six inches of soil small colonies of microbes, bacteria, fungi, worms and insects are busy, working together to create a fertile spot for next year’s garden.  It’ll be the best one ever.