Farm-to-Table: Harvest and clean-up

Yesterday evening we cleaned out the garden.  Weeded what was the tomato bed and pulled out the soaker hose.  Harvested the last good watermelon (the other one was rotting on the vine) and pulled the plants.  Surprisingly harvested sweet potatoes in their garbage pail (we thought they didn't produce anything from when we had checked on them earlier.  Then we dumped the soil from the cans into the old tomato bed.  When I went to dump the soil from the failed potato experiment we discovered that it wasn't a complete failure after all.  From three trash cans we harvested a grand total of five small potatoes!!  We're gobsmacked!  There's a couple of banana peppers still on the plant, but we didn't harvest them yet.

After harvesting, we peeled back the damaged weed block cloth and threw it out, removed the rocks that helped hold it down and stacked them under the stoop so they weren't in the way for mowing, and dumped the soil from the empty containers into the wallows we had created to help keep the containers from drying out (but became mosquito cesspools instead) and into the old tomato bed.

The corn, green beans, and tomatoes failed this year.  They didn't survive the boys' lack of care.  We found that our garden grew better when planted into our clay soil rather than in a raised bed with "garden mix" fetched from a local landscaping company, so our long-term garden plans are reconfigured.

No fall garden.  Didn't have sufficient opportunity to get it put in when it was viable planting time.  I was thinking of experimenting with mini hoop-houses, but there's been no headway on that pondering either.  Compost happens...