Anytime after the first freeze of fall I am on the lookout for a few days of nice weather in order to put the garden to bed. This weekend was perfect for the job, with temperatures in the 60s, bright blue skies and sun streaming through the red, orange and yellow trees. Such glorious weather is, I suppose, a small consolation for what is one of my saddest markers of seasonal change. Take a look at this pathetic sight:

I started with the tomatoes, cutting them down from their stakes.

I always use cotton or jute twine to stake my tomatoes so that at the end of the season everything can go right in the compost, which beats having to pick pieces of plastic or wire out of the jumbled vines. I wasn’t too meticulous with picking up the dropped fruit as I plan on running the chickens in here during winter and they will appreciate the treats.

Then I moved on to ripping up the cosmos and zinnias, and as I did I saved seed heads from varieties that did particularly well. I plan to scatter these seeds over some bare spots in hope of starting a wildflower patch.

Then I cut the hyacinth bean vines off of the deer fence. A tedious job, indeed, to avoid cutting the plastic fence. Next year I will sow my hyacinth bean up the sides of the metal chicken run. Finally I pulled the frozen peppers out. I was annoyed at myself to find that there were so many peppers that I hadn’t harvested before it was too late. This is what happens when the first frost happens when the farmer is out of town for a couple of days!

Then I took a break from the vegetable garden to walk through the pastures, cutting out the prickly shrubs that are the first woody plants to initiate reforestation of cleared areas. It took several big tractor bucket loads to get everything to the compost and brush piles in the woods.

By then the sun was setting and I had been working outside for more than seven hours in a row. So when the chickens headed into roost, I did the same, straight for a hot epsom salt bath. Up next: day two of vegetable garden cleanup.

Spent yesterday in the beautiful new crawlspace wresting a dehumidifier around all the HVAC ducting. Then back at the house today to do some preliminary grading. We wanted to raise the soil grade under the front porch before the tongue and groove flooring was installed, but before doing that we had to clean up tons of construction debris from around the foundation. I had budgeted a couple of hours for this project, but like with everything having to do with this house, it took much longer than anticipated.

There was much clean-up to do—from raking trimmed pieces of siding material and lumber out of the dirt and grass to picking up countless nails, many of which came out of the driveway. We also pulled tons of rocks and chunks of concrete away from the foundation. Then it was time to dump many tractor buckets of soil (saved when we dug the crawlspace deeper) through the porch joists.

And then came the fun of a long afternoon spent shoveling soaking wet clay into position to obtain the proper grade around the house for water to drain away from the foundation and not stay puddled against it. Man, that clay is heavy and even with two tractors and various helpful attachments (e.g. York rake), I am beat. In fact, little muscles I never knew I had in my forearms are so protesting as I type that I am signing off until another day. It didn’t feel like much changed until I looked at the before photo (above) and after (below). But in reality my parents and I got a lot of cleanup done around the house, and with each bucketful of crap we tip in the dumpster, the house morphs from construction scene to home.