Fall Gardening

Fall gardening is the gardening time of the year when spending time outdoors can be a marvellous pleasure or an unmitigated disaster. The other day – in the cold – I had a rather quickly passing thought that I’d go out and plant some bulbs. I got as far as the top step on the porch, turned around and lit a fire. Let’s not be silly about this little hobby of ours.

On the other hand, today was a marvellous day, shirtsleeve weather, and I cleaned out one garage, took down a few tomatoes (we still haven’t had frost) and went at the other fall chores. The Folkboat resident in the shop all summer has emerged, far from finished, but as far as it’s going to get this year. The planks were routed out and now I have to recaulk them to get the boat water-tight and able to get back into the water. I’ve already started negotiating time next spring when the snow leaves to finish this boat and get it into the water again. Needless to say, with a 25′ sailboat in the shop all summer, not much else got done in there and everything was just dumped hither and yon when I needed space. That piper has come home to roost and now I’m cleaning up, stacking some newly dried out oak lumber and some cedar for various projects I have in mind.

I also have several logs that were sitting on the ground so Buck and I picked them up (well, Buck picked them up while I encouraged him from the driver’s seat) and laid them on some risers so they wouldn’t be in contact with the soil. I have a few projects in mind for them as well and I don’t want the bugs to eat them or the rot to get at them. (If you’re new around here Buck is my John Deere tractor – deer=buck Get it? You’re right – not worth explaining)

So where is the garden in all this? I went at a 10-foot tall mulberry tree that had decided to grow in the wrong spot and I thought it would be a really good idea to move it to a new spot where I wanted it to grow. Between my still-sore,ankle, a hard clay soil that goes down forever and a perniciously attached root system, the tree won. It’s still there and I’m in the house drinking coffee and writing this down. But winning a battle around here doesn’t mean it has won the war. I’m still the head gardener and that tree is going. So I’ll move it in the spring or the lopping shears will find that slender trunk.

I only put in a few hundred bulbs this year, mostly daffodils in the front field to give us a bit of a show next spring and then allow them to naturalize out there. I really have to wait until the woody shrub border is planted next spring to start really collecting bulbs. The plan is to put them on the edges of the shrub borders so we’ll get the spring bloom and then allow them to die down when the shrubs take over. At least that’s the plan.

The plan next year calls for an increased number of bulbs for naturalizing but I’m glad I didn’t do them this year. I discovered that my bulb drill gadget that goes onto the end of an electric drill) doesn’t work worth a darn in heavy sod and clay soils. It had my old drill heating up and starting to smoke so I went to the old-fashioned shovel. Next year I’ll be prepared (and have a healthy ankle) to go with the shovel and will plan for smaller bulbs and more of them. Turns out the drill works fine in garden soil (I used it for the trial bulbs including some new tulips ) but not in the naturalized fields.

The last chore to do for this fall (that has to be done) is to clean out the containers, stack them in the garage and then walk away from the garden to leave it survive (or not) on it’s own till next spring. There’s little extra work being done this year. Some of the things I’d like to do, like stack a little extra firewood and do a bit of cleaning up beyond the garden won’t get done as far as I’d like but I’ll continue to chew away at them bit by bit.

And now, after working all day I find myself with a cup of coffee, a heating pad on the ankle and a laptop on the … well, lap. I’m thinking about how much I didn’t get done and reminding myself that I did get a ton of work done around here this year. I may not have reached all my lofty goals but I did make some darn nice progress. And the Year-1 garden party (we had year zero this year) will show an entirely new face to the world – it will be the start of looking like a garden and a lot of those bones were laid this year. Next year, I’ll flesh out the bones…. after I finish that silly Folkboat.

You can tell I’m putting this garden to bed outside as well as in my head. I’m celebrating what I did accomplish and shaking my head at what I left undone (yeah, type A personality) but like all real gardeners, I know that next year is going to be a heck of a lot better than last year. Oh yeah baby! Wait’l next year!