The End of the Summer Gardening Season

On Saturday we ripped up all the watermelon, cucumber, and tomato plants from our front-yard garden. It’s such a cathartic process to purge everything. 

We had a pretty good season. We didn’t stake our tomatoes well and bought the really sprawling kind, so those didn’t go as well as they could have. Our watermelon plants got aphids, but they continued to produce a ton of watermelons all summer long. Next year we’ll be more intentional about which kind of tomato plants we buy, and we’ll do some proactive organic stuff to head off the aphids. 

Last year, I was so spent from work that I had no energy for the fall growing season. This year I’m feeling much better. Once we get everything 100% cleared out, we’ll add compost and some new soil and then plant some stuff for the fall. 

The front-yard garden is working out really well. The dogs, chickens, and pigs stay out of it. We haven’t had any issues with neighborhood cats or other animals. The automatic irrigation is the best thing ever. I was really worried about installing a garden in our front yard because I was afraid that I would be overwhelmed with the work, everything would die, and our yard would look terrible. It’s not much work at all (hallelujah!), we get food all season long (hooray!), and our yard looks fine even when there’s nothing growing (phew!).