autumn projects in the vegetable beds

I'm still growing food, like my half-bed of lettuces (with appropriately fall-colored marigolds in the back of them)

and there are artichokes and basil (in flower) still looking happy (even after one 33 degree night)

I've dug holes for the currants I will plant in spring, so that spring's workload will be less, and marked them with sticks. I've found a FREE source of well-rotted wood chips, that had been chipped into very small pieces last year, so I'm spreading it all over. Here is the area where the melons were this year, and where I think I'll try strawberries next year. (well netted against birds and squirrels, for sure.)

I've built a leaf mould bin and chipped two bags of leaves from this year, and the leaves that hadn't yet decomposed from last year:

The leaves from last year that had decomposed into nice leaf mould as of the first of October this year, I spread under this tarp I'm using to solarize the soil (that is, kill the grass and weeds beneath it so that next year, I can plant food into it). I tried both clear and black plastic for that, and black works far, far better (though the internet would tell you otherwise, oddly.) The photo is blurry, not your vision. By the time the worms are done with the leaf mold, it'll be a great place to plant melons and pumpkins next year, and they can vine all over down there in full sunlight.

Down the slope from my back yard fence, I have coarse wood chips from deliveries in December and April, and all the way down/right near the street, a thin line of the new free mulch I found, which you can see is darker and prettier, so I'll be bringing a lot more of that home. There's another black tarp uphill of that, and uphill of the tarp, I'm trying cover crops: small turnips and two kinds of radishes I'll let rot in the ground, lentils, and crimson clover. (Deer or rabbits have eaten a lot of the radish leaves.) By this time next year that whole slope will no longer be grass, so I won't have to mow. (I'd rather spend 8 hours weeding than 2 hours push-mowing, partly because I can weed when it's cool, and partly because I find it much more pleasant work. Also, food--or even nice perennial flowers--make more sense than lawn to me. What is up with the affection some folks have for grass? It's BORING.

I tell you, I'm damned proud of myself. If I'd done a better job of taking pictures of the perennial weeds and dead trees and half-dead bushes and poison ivy that was there when I moved in, you'd see how very much I accomplished in just 17 months. Give me 30 months, and this place will be both beautiful and a vegetable and fruit farm that produces more than enough for me for a full year. I had 20 square feet of veg garden space in Year 1 and 800 this year. In Year 3, I'll have over 3000 square feet I reclaimed from weeds and grass.

Thanks to my aunt, I have a pressure canner for next year. She bought it in 2001, used it once, and never used it again, and she gets some of my veg bounty, so that works out well for us both. Today I'm getting a fishing pole from my brother-in-law so I can provide more of my own food next year. He's also giving me venison this fall, assuming he bags one, so I might have to buy a little chest freezer next year.

I have another three or four weeks of hard work to do with getting more mulch and spreading it, but I love working in fall--it's dry, it's cool, the mosquitoes are gone, the gnats aren't biting, and when you sweat, it evaporates right away. It's still work, but it feels good to do it.