Fall gardening chores

Today I screwed up my courage and went out to the vegetable garden. I had brought in the half-dozen winter squash and the half-dozen pumpkins we had grown in one of our garden plots this season. Now it was time to pull out the plants and till up the soil.

The picture here shows some of the late harvest -- winter squash, zucchini, red and green bell peppers, tomatoes, and black-eyed peas. We've been getting tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants since July. And we had a lot of haricots verts and haricots jaunes (wax beans) back in July and August. The beans were finished a while back.

The winter squash turned out really nice this year, and the pumpkins too. We have been enjoying pureed squash as a vegetable with our meals, and also pumpkin pies. We plan to make pumpkin soup -- or you could call it butternut squash soup if you wanted.

But back to gardening. It rained yesterday, and I was afraid the ground might be too wet and heavy (there's a lot of clay in the soil) for the tiller. But I got it out anyway, and got it started. It turned out fine and I was able to till the plot without too much trouble.

Here's the result of the tilling. The garden plots are 4 metres square (that's about 13' by 13'). While I was tilling, I looked out ahead of the rototiller and saw a big brown frog squirming on the ground. At first I thought I might have run over it with the tiller, but I don't think I did. I think it had buried itself in the soft earth and the noise of the tiller had scared it out. It was just extracting itself from its buried position when I noticed it. I picked it up and put in down in a patch of parsley in the herb garden, which I wasn't planning to run the tiller over. So it has survived. I've found smaller brown frogs in the garden in the past, when I've been working the soil.

Meanwhile, we've been working on trimming our bay laurel hedge. It's more than 100 yards long, surrounding our property on three sides, so it's no trivial task. In 2003 and 2004, we hired a guy to do it for us, but we've decided that's kind of expensive and, besides, what else do we have to do? So we went out and bought an electric hedge-trimmer and a long, long extension cord. We've been working on it for a few days now. Here are a couple of pictures.

We will be saving $400 or so by doing this work ourselves. And our collection of power tools for the garden grows constantly: lawn mower, rototiller, weed-eater, chainsaw, hedge-clipper...