Organizing the potting shed

It's a quiet time of year in the garden. While I was away traveling in Seattle, there was enough frost to convince the tomatoes to give up the ghost. sytharin had tried planting carrots, but without success. The same went for lettuce. It looks like we'll have a reasonable crop of kale and mustard greens, at least, but things are still a touch on the young side.

All these factors make it a good time to work on tidying projects, and to judge by her garden productivity this weekend, sytharin agreed. We are lucky to have some great complementary inclinations. She likes to go through and do a bunch of the larger-scale weeding projects (and she mows the grass!), and then I'll come along some time later to help transport all of the brush piles towards the branch-chipping area and compost.

Anyway, today I went through my collection of potted plants on the back patio, pulled out all the pots with dead things in them, repotted a couple of herb plants that were looking root-bound, and generally tidied things up.



When we had a rental car about a month ago, scrottie took the opportunity to buy a whiskey barrel and cart it home so he could re-pot his apple tree. It's often possible to get "half-barrel" planters, but those are really only 1/3 of a barrel and aren't deep enough for a tree. Also it seems to me like many of those "half-barrel" planters weren't actually barrels to begin with, to judge by the wood quality. Anyway, he used three-quarters of the real whiskey barrel for the apple tree and was then had a left-over, shallow, quarter-barrel piece. So I moved the quarter-barrel out front and transplanted the Mara des Bois strawberry into it. Eventually I'll add more plants to hopefully increase next year's strawberry yield, so long as the deer don't discover it.


This photo also provides evidence of RAC's efforts to clear out the dead tomato wreckage and assess what happened to the sweet potatoes. The enthusiastic tomatoes appear to have prevented sweet potato production, so the sweet potatoes are staying in place for now and maybe we'll have a spring crop. We'll see.

Then I cleaned out and reorganized the potting shed.



It's still too full of stuff, which I think is the inherent nature of potting sheds, so I don't expect it to stay perfectly organized, but at least things are now in a state where there are better indicators for where various things should be put away.

And now I feel much better about the state of the garden, especially because sytharin also made such good progress on her tidying projects. Neither of us has had quite as much time as we'd like to keep things reigned in. But if we can get a reasonable start in during the cool winter months we'll at least be in adequate shape for 2017.