2nd week of November 2008
Wonderful blessings were delivered to our farm this week. The mountain of leaves was the result of 9 dumptruck loads delivered from the nearby town. With manure added, it will become marvelous compost for the gardens and pastures next year. Some of the bagged leaves were directly dumped on a garden area needing additional fertility and others helped cover beds of carrots, beets and turnips for winter digging. The precious bags of already shredded leaves are shown going onto the garlic beds to insulate them for the winter and suppress next spring's weeds. So one town's trash became the farmer's treasure. The electric company crew trimming trees was also glad to be able to dump their load of wood chips in a pile that will be used for mulch. We indeed are blessed by castoffs!
The nice days for working outdoors are less frequent but there still are corners of color left in the garden. A few stray purple mallow plants surprised me by surviving the frost and made a nice little table bouquet. I'm in charge of decorations for our childrens' piano recital this weekend and was scouting around for anything decent left in the garden. I ended up making small swags for the tables using sage, horehound and pumpkin tree branches and using birdhouse and apple gourds we harvested earlier. One late vegetable I'm especially enjoying having an abundance of are leeks. The are delicious sliced up into soups and stir fries. The remaining 30 or so left in the bed will need to be pulled and stored in a 5 gallon bucket in the basement with sand or soil packed in. I'm curious to see how long they will keep. With the temperatures dipping lower, we'll need to gather the last of the veggies left above ground to put in the root cellar.
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