Cleaning Up the Vegetable Garden

Well I finally got down to business after seeing this yesterday.

It was time to put the vegetable garden to bed for the winter.  I had already begun cleaning out the beds but the hard frost we had two days ago killed off what little was left.  So in I went, with hoe in hand, removing the frozen tomatoes, the blackened marigolds and zinnias.  Despite the frost I did manage to find a few goodies and we enjoyed our final fresh salad of the season last night for dinner.  Made from a few small leaves of lettuce, a beet, onions that had been buried and the last of the cherry tomatoes.  Oh I miss summer already.

When I put these raised beds together in the spring all but one had the grass dug out from beneath them.  As I pulled the remaining plants out of the beds I was surprised to find how deep the zinnias and tomatoes had dug themselves in.  Their roots extended wide and deep, penetrating into the forked soil below the range of the raised boxes.  Obviously removing the grass and digging into the soil below the boxes was the right thing to do as the plants took full advantage of the extra space.  It also allowed insects and worms to travel through to the boxes from below.  I found numerous worms making themselves at home as well as a violent ground beetle.

There is however one box that did not have the sod removed.  I layered newspaper over the grass instead and placed the box on top and filled it with dirt.  I thought now might be a good time to go in and remove that grass.  This box, oddly, is the one our feral cat Priscilla has chosen as her litterbox.  As soon as the plants were removed she moved in and has made herself at home.  Priscilla was found, just recently, to have a case of tapeworms.  Yup, that's gross and seriously unsanitary.  So I decided to kill two birds with one stone.  I removed all of the dirt from the box and used it to fill up a flower bed that we are building.

We've been removing grass out of this area for the last month to expand the bed and it needed to be topped up with soil.  As there won't be any edibles grown here I don't mind placing the contaminated soil in this spot.  Once the soil was removed from the box I was able to scrape back the newspaper and assess what work needed to be done to the grass below.  Good news!  There isn't any grass.

Running my fork through the newspaper I found that the grass had been composted and all that was left were some roots.  All that is necessary is to turn the soil and loosen it up.  Then I can fill the box with soil again.  I'm leaving that job until spring though.  In the meantime, I covered up all of the boxes with layers of straw (and when I ran out of straw I used cardboard).  The straw will keep the soil warm, and keep the weeds and cats out.

In case you're wondering, there are a few plants still sticking out.  One of these is the perennial chives and the others are carrots.  Since we had such as seriously large haul of carrots I thought I might attempt overwintering a few.  The thought of fresh carrots in the spring has me attempting this trick.  I'll report back to let you know how this works out.

Also, Priscilla is now receiving worm medication.  I found a nice veterinarian who sold me some tablets which you can put in the cat's food.  All of our feline friends have now been treated.  Even so I'm still working on keeping the cats out of my beds.  The biggest problem seems to be there is nowhere on this property that isn't covered in grass.  Cats like to dig and hide their mess.  The texture of wood mulch and dirt are highly attractive to them as they can easily paw through it.  I'm wondering if it would be completely insane to dig an area that would be just for cats to use.  Ya, okay it would.  Chances are, being cats, they would turn their noses up and dig in my garden beds anyway.