Today dawned in marked contrast to the last few days. In place of cool mist and fog were bright sun and almost 70 degree temperatures. I seized the opportunity to complete the year’s final tasks in the garden that surrounds the house.

I started by robbing my compost pile that’s been in the making for almost a year. It’s a mix of garden waste, grass clippings, soiled chicken house bedding, and kitchen scraps. Instead of engaging in a hot composting process, which requires a more precise mix of nitrogen-rich greens and carbonous browns, plus proper moisture and aeration, I just throw everything in a pile in the woods and let time work its magic. Which it does, yielding a worm-full and deeply nutritious mix that every fall gets spread about the farm.

I forked the compost into the big tractor bucket. I prefer using this large bucket when dealing with bulky materials because it can carry much more than the smaller bucket. The downside, though, is that I can’t dig or scoop with this big bucket without damaging the tractor’s arms, so that means lots of hand forking. In many ways this is still necessary, though, as the margins of the pile aren’t well defined and the pile isn’t large enough to efficiently scoop with a small bucket anyway.

I managed to eek two large buckets of compost out of my pile. It’s not a ton, but I spread it almost an inch thick over all the exposed dirt in the garden and even had enough to pile some extra around heavy feeders, such as the roses.

Once the compost was down, I went back for mulch. My target was the remnants of the ten yards that were delivered in early April. They’d been spread about a bit in the field and briars and grass were starting to grow up in the pile.

This required lots of hand forking and tedious, prickly picking through, but I managed to get four big bucketfuls out of a rather insubstantial looking pile. Not only did it feel good to reclaim something for which I’d paid good money, but the eight-month rest in the field had decomposed the mulch the absolutely perfect consistency—damp, dark, crumbly and ready to go to work building soil. It makes me realize I should be ordering all my mulch at least half a year in advance of when I want to apply it.

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows that when it comes to mulch, I prioritize its soil-building properties over any aesthetic contribution it may make to the landscape. The key to building good soil is keeping it mulched with an appropriate material, one that breaks down and adds organic matter to the soil. When you’re working with what I’ve got here—compacted red Virginia clay around a construction site—short of digging out all the native dirt and replacing it the only way to create great soil is through repeated application of amendments such as compost and mulch. Do that for ten or fifteen years and you might get somewhere. I am three years in and my fantasies of dropping a trowel and having it sink blade deep in rich, black soil are a long way off.

But I work at it. And will keep working at it every year as long as I can wield the pitchfork.

By sundown I could barely move but I was finished spreading compost and mulch, and I felt good about this final gardening act of the year. This is always one of the most physically demanding days of the year, and I am glad to have it behind me. Now I celebrate, and rest easy knowing I have left a nutritious blanket over my garden that will nourish it through this winter and into the spring to come. It’s a good feeling, despite the protest of every nerve  and muscle in my bone-tired body. I’m headed for the epsom salts and a scalding bath, and most likely a well-deserved beer.

The brilliant fall colors and blue skies of a week ago are gone, replaced by dark and fog. It’s so socked in that the chickens put themselves to bed before four in the afternoon, and I haven’t seen the mountain in my front yard for two days.

After lots of computer work this weekend I had to tear myself away from the woodstove and get outside. I loaded up Tuck and we drove a short way from my house for a muddy, mizzly walk that brought to mind similar tramps across the English countryside.

I am really struck by how much it looks like winter now. There are a few hints that we’re just tiptoeing over the starting line of the season, such as the still-green grass and the last of the dangling, russet leaves, but it’s really clear now that this will be the view for many more months. Here’s to making the most of it, and trying to find its subtle beauty.

What, you thought I wrote all these posts myself?

The last month has been so ridiculously gorgeous that I’ve been taking photos around the farm almost every day. I don’t know exactly what it is about this year, but everything is more lush and vibrant than usual for October and November. Perhaps it’s attributable to my own personal shift in perspective, but the pragmatist in me suspects that it has to do with the ample rain we received last spring and summer, and that for the first time since I moved back to this area we did not have a summer drought nor did we suffer the hellacious storms and heat waves of recent summers.

Whatever the cause, it’s been an inspiring season. Here are some random shots that I hope convey this fall’s experience at Bonafide Farm.

As we head into the darkest days of winter, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the prospect of at least five months of diminished light and cold, brown scenery. In an arsenal of coping strategies that includes Christmas lights, wood stove parties, strong dark beers, and emergency beach vacations, I offer one more tool: bulbs.

Spring bulbs, specifically. The show begins in March with the dwarf iris that shine indigo under late-season snowfall, and carries on to the tiny cerulean scilla that remind me of the September sky. These little spots of blue, planted right along the front walkway, arrive when I’ve about given up and remind me that in just a few weeks the yard will be spotted with yellow daffodils. And once the daffodils arrive I can begin to breathe the scent of thawing soil while I lose myself in spring garden planning and sowing the first sweet peas. I have made it through the winter, and will be okay.

But this late-winter rescue requires some premeditation, actually begun last August when I placed my spring bulb order. This year I am trying, for the first time, Brent and Becky’s Bulbs. Though they ship all over, they are a Virginia-based company, which I like as I believe the odds of anything they grow thriving in my Virginia garden are good. My order arrived a few days ago, and everything looks great. The box was full of 145 nice, plump, healthy bulbs.

Of course I ordered a few unusual varieties of one of my favorite flowers, daffodils. I can never have enough. And I am experimenting with some alliums, based mostly upon how popular they appear to be in the gardens created by some of my favorite naturalist and New Perennial movement garden designers.

Today I will slip all these bulbs under the soil for their long winter’s nap. And then, if all goes well, we will meet again in March, just when I need them most.

Sunday morning dawned just a beautifully as Saturday, though it was cooler and substantially more windy. After lunch I headed outside to keep working at the vegetable garden cleanup. Unfortunately I had overdone it the day before and reactivated an old injury, a muscle spasm in my upper back next to my shoulder blade. In addition to being constantly uncomfortable, it makes turning my head to the right, such as when backing up the car, downright painful. Farming. Let me count the ways it hurts.

Regardless of any physical discomfort, the garden still needed more attention. First I dug out a couple dozen dahlia tubers for winter storage in the garage. I was amazed at the size of most of these tubers—just gigantic. Seeing this, I am suspicious that something caused this year’s dahlias to put their energy into making tubers instead of into flowers. More research on my theory to come.

I moved the dahlias’ labels, which are attached with twist-ties, from the wire support cages directly to the tubers to keep them properly labeled.

I stacked the custom-made cages and wired their ground pins to them for safekeeping. When I get around to it I will layer the tubers in boxes of peat to keep them from either drying out or rotting during winter. Last year I hung the tubers in mesh bags in the garage and lost some of them to drying out, so I will try a different technique this year.

Then I had to figure out what to do with the Glass Gem corn stalks. I tried digging one stalk out, but the root ball that came with it was so massive and full of soil and beneficial worms that I realized I’d be transplanting most of my hard-won, improved garden soil directly into the woods if I chose that route. So I decided to chop each stalk off at the ground and hope that the root balls would just decompose and continue to feed the soil without the major disturbance of digging. We’ll see. I figured that come next spring, anything I’d want to plant in this area can be tucked amongst any stalks or root balls that may be left over.

I am undecided about what to do with the stalks. I am heading toward leaving them on the ground over the garden. They will form a nice mulch layer to protect the soil below during winter, and if they’re still around in the spring they’ll be easy to pick up and remove to the compost pile. I plan on putting down a layer of compost then heavily mulching with straw anyway, so these corn stalks perform much the same function and help stretch the straw budget.

I still need to get the tomato stakes out, and then the next step involves shoveling compost into the garden and spreading straw. But as I was not in great compost-shoveling condition with this muscle knot, once I got the dahlias up and the corn down I quit garden cleanup and headed to town for an hour and half of vigorous vinyasa yoga in a warm studio, followed by liberal application of the gym’s hot tub jets to my back muscles.