Since I’m part of a community garden, the garden arranges with the small city it’s in to have the road crews deposit an enormous pile of smashed, compacted leaves to our garden property. We top our raised beds with about 6 inches of leaf mulch before winter. Some of this of course breaks down over winter and “feeds” the soil. I. The spring I actually move the mulch to plant and then re mulch around the plants to help reduce weeds and to keep moisture in the garden.
If you have the ability to get some compost free you should
Get
Some and work it into your soil! And unless Colorado leaves aren’t good for gardens OT wouldn’t hurt to lay a few inches over your soil. If it snows
It compacts it and it doesn’t blow away!
Thanks for the ideas and advise. The compost is actually not free, since the city contracts with private company to process the collected compost items. But I like the idea of supporting the effort. (We do have piles of free “mulch” from ground up tree bark - it is rather rough and not uniform, but the price is right…. I use as bottom layer around flower gardens).
I have access to free horse manure. I think it is somewhat aged. Has anybody used manure for fall garden care?
I have spread composted (dried) manure on my garden, and tilled it into the soil, both in the Fall and the Spring. I also spread a straw mulch on my garden from the late Fall to the early Spring, for the same reasons that @abasket states.
Dirt is dirt until you add yummy nutrients to it like compost, mulched nature byproducts, manure, etc.! You don’t need to go overboard but some in fall and spring is a good idea!
With outside gardening ending soon (though the lawn is lush and many of my outdoor annuals are still going strong!) time to put a little focus on indoor plants. My girls have me really enjoying houseplants!
I have been busy bringing in my geraniums. When my mother died last summer, she had indoor potted geraniums on her window sill and under a grow light. (The original source was likely from my yard, where she gardened for 2 decades). I put them outside, some in ground and some still in pots. I was able to propagate some new ones too. Last winter they came inside and then all got planted in ground or big planters.
Here is a photo of all before they came inside. Most are light pink, all from my mother, plus a few new (dark pink, white).
Always. Between that, chicken droppings from the coop (comes with shavings we buy for them), and various plant cuttings from around here (trees, old plants, weeds that haven’t gone to seed, old hay, etc) we never buy or use anything else.
We’ve never tested our soil, but plants grow very, very well. It was a bit of a clay base, but not in the garden anymore.
Thought of you folks yesterday. We had some workers at the yard for various things, including dig out of some old, oddly shaped evergreen bushes. When I heard that hubby had asked the workers to take away some of the extra dirt, I had to go running out front and have the workers turn their wheelbarrow around.
He thought it was mostly useless clay, but it actually was fairly crumbly and not too bad. I’ll mix it with compost and maybe bagged soil for planters and garden improvements next year.
Thought of my CC gardening pals again today. Are your gardens now readied for winter?
This morn after helping with the church “giving garden” cleanup (roll up weed mat, remove drip irrigation), I went back to the freebie pile of AGED MANURE from the adjacent horse farm neighbors. Came home with a tub of it, almost no smell - looks a lot like soil. I don’t know much about manure, but another more savvy gardener friend who was loading it into his pickup truck was really delighted with it… says it is probably 2 or 3 years old, easy to handle.
I’ll soon have some raked leaves…. probably some of them ground up with the leaf blower/mulcher. Usually we put them at curb for town pickup (or drop off a the waste-division site), but this year I can use in my garden and the church garden.
Aged horse manure is the best! Although I heard that elephant manure is even better. Our local zoo used to sell it in bags for a fundraiser- it sold out like hotcakes!
I have pulled out the last remaining tomato plant (a cherry tomato) and a few dead vines. We haven’t had our first killing frost yet, and I hope that it holds off long enough for me to harvest the remaining field peas that have pods on them. Thanksgiving weekend is when I usually put garlic in the ground and mulch it over.
Once the frost kills off the remaining plants, I will spread some composted manure, till everything under, and spread a straw mulch over the garden to suppress weed growth come Spring. After the final mulching, I will settle in with a couple of seed catalogues and start dreaming of next year’s garden.
We’ve had an especially warm autumn, almost no snow year… not great for water situation but nice for gardening and raking. Yesterday we had bright sun and 70 degree weather.
I did not get out into the yard, but a buddy who planned to do so had a great comment - “It’s nice to garden this time of year. When you pull the weeds, they don’t come back for a very long time”.
Although I heard that elephant manure is even better. Our local zoo used to sell it in bags for a fundraiser- it sold out like hotcakes!
!!