As winter approaches, things in the garden are growing slower, our garden updates are happening less, and we are preparing our farm for winter. This includes insulating all of our perennial beds with straw, adding cover crop to annual beds, cutting down dead plants, and general clean up of all of our tools and materials. In addition to all of those tasks, this week we spent some time this week "solarizing" a few beds in our flower garden. Without all of our lovely volunteers this summer, some parts of our flower garden got a little out of control with weeds. We have a few beds that have become overtaken with tall grasses. In order to kill of these grasses over the winter, we weed-wacked them down to almost nothing, tilled up the soil to disturb the plants root system, and then we covered the entire bed in a plastic tarp secured down with rocks and bricks. Our hope is that the heat from the sun will be trapped under these clear tarps, helping to kill off any remaining grasses over the winter. Here is what our flower garden looks like currently...
Wish us luck!
We still have quite a few things growing in the garden including, collard greens, kale, swiss chard, beets, radishes, and spinach. Next week we will do one last big donation before finishing up for the winter.
Lastly, we received a few updates of our mint plants! A few folks who got plants from us in October through the Philip Howard NORC Program sent us some plant updates.
Their plants look beautiful and we are glad to see they are thriving!