Winter chores in the garden

July has come and with it bitterly cold evenings and some major rain and wind. But for the last two days we have had warm days. This morning we got stuck into the garden and did the following:

Turned the two compost heaps - it was so delightful to see the steam rising from the centre. This means that the microbes are doing their thing and breaking down the leaves and grass. We should have great compost by the time summer comes.

Pulled out spent chilli and pepper plants - I also decided to see if I can get the storingest of these to produce again next season. I cut them right back, fed them with volcanic rock dust and repositioned them.

Cleaned out the coop - The chooks roosting pole has a large depost of poop which we scraped out and added to the compost - this speeds up the compost process. We gave them new straw in their tyres and scrubbed water feeders.

Seperated onions - when we planted the onion seeds we did them too close. We replanted these.

Sorted out the wormery - the layers needed to be turned and swapped.

Harvest - Took anything that could find it's way into a salad. This was lettuce leaves, lovely little yellow tear drop tomatoes, snow peas and green pepper.

We made a list of the things to get to for winter:

Horse manure
Broad beans
Spinach seedlings (I lost my entire batch of home seeded organic spinach to my chickens who snuck into the garden one day when we weren't looking)
Potting soil

Now my back is sore!



Here is a picture of the garden at the moment. It looks rather sad to me, but I will choose to embrace the season and look eagerly forward to Spring!