The Four Gardening Seasons – Fall

After a long hot summer season of gardening I must say it’s nice to see fall arriving. Even though there’s a chill in the air, heralding the long cold winter months coming, there’s something wondrous & somehow satisfying about watching your garden mature, offer up it’s bounties, and beginning it’s preparation for the winter season.

Harvest Time

Though it brings with it a fair amount of work harvesting your garden, and otherwise preparing the soil for it’s annual rest period, it becomes very enjoyable, in part I think because you know pretty soon old man winter is going to blast in, and you realize that mid winter you’ll be looking back on the fall harvest and winterizing work as being a pretty pleasant memory.

There’s lots to do. No doubt we’ll have spent a good amount of time at Gramma’s great big garden patch, harvesting everything from potatoes to onions, broccoli to Brussels sprouts, and of course the peas and carrots and everything in between. Keeping an eye on the weather forecast each night in case a frost is forecast, then rushing to cover all the frost tender tomatoes and cucumbers, in the often vain hope of getting them through a night or two of frost. Don’t forget raspberry canes to prune, strawberries to mulch over, rhubarb to cut and freeze, and of course the annual trip around the neighborhood trying to give away copious quantities of zucchini’s.

The trouble is everybody else has a garden full of zucchini’s as well!

Of course there’s the flower garden to tend. Delphinium’s and Peony’s to cut down, Lilly’s to trim, perennials to cut down. Time to empty the compost bin, clean out the squirrel proof bird feeder, and the list goes on.

Make sure to take some time to enjoy the fall

It’s also a great time to enjoy the fall colours that our wonderful Rocky Mountain foothills offer, and no fall ends without at least a day or two just enjoying the autumn in the bush.

Then it’s back to the garden, trimming trees, using your best leaf blower and getting ready to wind down in sync with when the season does. It’s always a good feeling when everything is done before winter sets in, like storing your best garden spade .

Yes a busy time, but all you have to do is think of what’s coming!

Read More at Gardening in the Winter.