Digging Season

I love digging season! The Growing Season doesn't show off my best gardening skills but they do shine in Digging Season. With the advent of this cooler weather of early autumn (thanks, Earl!) I'm tackling those pre-winter chores that are just too strenuous for the sticky days of summer. My one real summer gardening skill is building compost piles.

The first of these jobs was to feed and mulch the fruit trees my friend L. and I planted this spring. After a summer of radio and news stories about the environment, gardening, and what we've done for our soil... especially this recent one about the benefits of organic agriculture... I decided the idea of feeding my trees with little granules of mystery chemistry was off the books. Instead, I raided my summer compost pile and dumped three buckets of rough compost around each tree.


This should, I hope, feed the trees and start to kill (by light suppression) the grass around them. I used 6" tall hoops of wire garden mesh (formerly imprisoning our dwarf apples) to contain the compost on that very windy slope. Around the cage I used splits of lovely rotting rye straw to keep the grass down and make it easier for Mr. Fuzzy to mow neatly forevermore.

: D