Cleanup After the Fall Garden by Byron Chitwood
After the first killing frost and freeze, most of the fall gardening is over with. The exception might be some of cool hardy crops such as collards, cabbages, broccoli and chard. The rest will have frozen and is ready to be pulled to get ready for the coming spring crops.
Pull all the frozen vegetable plants and put them in the compost pile or container. For quicker and more thorough composting, run a lawnmower over the ones with stems such as green bean and okra plants. If you suspect that your tomato plants had a disease, these should be destroyed or placed in a garbage container destined for the landfill. Some tomato diseases remain dormant in the plants until the next year and might infect your spring crop. There are too many tomato plant diseases to elaborate on them in this article.
Clean all the sticks and stones from the surface of your garden. Then place a layer of leaves over the portion of the garden that does not have any surviving vegetables such as collards. Till the leaves under and rake the bed smooth. If we have a wet winter, most of the leaves will compost before the next planting season. Do this every year and your garden soil will become very mellow and have good “tilth” or be very crumbly and friable.
If you do not have a compost pile or container, just dig a trench in your garden about two feet wide and half a foot deep. Then place the plant material that you have pulled and recover it in the trench. This material will compost during the winter. Also, during the winter months, bury your kitchen waste such as all vegetable matter, fruit peels, and coffee grounds in your garden area. Weeds that pop up in flower beds should also be buried in the garden. You might want to ask your non-gardening neighbors to save their kitchen scraps for you. Then reward them in the spring with some fresh vegetables.
During the winter months, there are some weeds that germinate and start to grow in your garden area. Don’t let these get too far ahead of you. Keep them hoed and turned under, especially the winter grasses.
You might want to plant a cover crop to prevent erosion and add back some fertility and vegetation to your soil. However, this is a subject for another article that I hope to complete soon.