Here is the mess we arrived to a few Saturdays ago:
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| Yes, there were teeny, baby, unripe peppers still on there that I took home! |
But it was highly productive and we cleaned up and re-planted six beds!
Re-planted with what, you ask?
A cover crop!!
We bought a mix that's great to restore nutrients into the soil along with an inoculator (which we can never remember the name of nor do we really know how it entirely works).
We cleaned out the dead plants and weeds, turned over the beds, planted the seed mix, and spread leaves on top (and hose on that to keep the leaves from blowing away until they'd been rained on).
We also found a scary amount of slugs :-/
That has not been our previous experience, so this is concerning. Also explained the super bizarre "jelly sacs" we found in one of the beds. (Like, did our garden get into bubble tea...? ooohhh....Google says no, it's something far horrible-er.)
So I entered myself into the slug-throwing discus contest and got some pretty decent awards for distance. (The benefits of having a plot next to the woods!)
Nasty buggers!
The leaves for covering I brought from home.
How do you keep a tall (and ridiculously stuffed full) bag of leaves from falling over in your car?
I was insanely proud of this one! :-D
Just pulled the backseat's seatbelt into the "trunk" and it fit around the back absolutely perfectly so it wasn't going anywhere!
We were sore and largely numb after 3 hours working in 50 degrees, but were very pleased with the progress.
The beds all (almost all) cleaned up!
And we didn't leave empty-handed because we harvested our potatoes!!!
They're mostly little squirts, but I roasted mine up and they were delicious!
Because of time, coldness and the fact that there was still quite a bit of green on the peanut leaves, I said we should leave them in the ground and I'd come out some weeknight and harvest them.
Yeaaaah, except that I forgot the time change was that night which means it gets dark at 5!
So this week I left work early to give me about an hour and a half and ended up needing every minute of that! Shockingly, not because of the peanut harvesting, though!
So last year, we had read that you're supposed to loosen the dirt around them and gently pull the plants which will come up with all their little "fingers" still attached to the subterranean peanuts.
Except that we waited until I think December to harvest them and they were not a nice shade of yellow...they were brown and dead and a disaster!
We ended up digging for the no-longer-attached peanuts in what had become a mud bed!
This year, because of the frost we got at the end of last week, the plants had gone from their green with yellow tips to that deep green/blackish color of frosted plants. Perfect time to get them out!
So, rather skeptically, I dug around them with my shovel, gathered the plant arms, gentle pulled ....aaaaaaaand.....
out they came!!!
It was beautiful! Sure enough, most of the little "fingers" were strong enough to hold onto their peanuts and lift them from the dirt.
Made me so happy!
I dug around a bit and found a few more as I was turning over the bed, but that only produced a small pile of loose ones; by and large most are still attached on these huge bunches! Perfect for hanging to dry! In case you couldn't tell: I'M SO EXCITED!!!
Here's the stash on a full size black garbage bag. Great crop!
We were disappointed that in about half the bed, the peanuts we planted just never "took". But this is a great crop! Probably more than last year since we had quite a few rotten ones because we'd let them sit in the muddy earth so long!
In turning over the bed, I discovered what I think is the reason why the peanuts only took in one part of the bed:
Clay.
Thick, mucky, horrible, rock-like clay!
I do NOT remember that when we turned it over last year, so no idea what happened there, but everywhere the peanuts hadn't grown was this awful stuff that took me forever to dug out and try to chop up.
By then it was getting dark fast and I was sore and my fingers were going numb ("50 degrees means I'll be fine in a long sleeve shirt and gardening gloves if I'm working, right?" mmmhmmm.)
So I did the best I could, planted the cover crop and we'll have to do some major restoration on that in the spring! Come on alfalfa seeds and wormies! Do your magic!
I finished up, proudly slinging my peanut filled black Santa sack, just as the sun was setting and clouds were rolling in...
And here's what it looks like with one more bed all cleaned up.
Just have carrots and garlic to harvest at some point.
And then the atrocious strawberry bed and tiny bean bed to clean-up, but you know what? It's cold. They may just wait until spring!
So some successes, many failures.
Next year is another year!
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