November Yard Cleanup

We had a wild week last week. We were hard at work cleaning up the yard for winter and putting the plants to bed. We had been gifted with a string of non-rainy, very warm days and I definitely didn't want to waste them. There's always so much to do to get ready for winter. And honestly I have had a lot of nervous energy to burn all week as I repeatedly checked the internet for election results. 

I went through and cleaned up all the spent perennials. It makes the yard look a little less ragged as things start to die off. I'll have to do a second round after a few hard freezes. I also cleaned up all the deceased annuals in pots so that the pots can be stored in the garage for winter. Some pots I overwinter against the house to give the hardier plants a chance to survive, but if they don't it's okay. 

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Dahlias! We hard our first frost/hard freeze at the end of October and it nipped most of the flowers. I dug up all of the dahlia bulbs and put them in paper bags to store them in the basement for winter.

Each bag holds one type of dahlia. Most of these bags have multiple bulbs in them! Looking at all the bags together... I have A LOT of dahlias. I put the bulbs in the paper bag dirt and all and it seems to work for the winter. The paper bags are each put in a plastic shopping bag, then stored in crates in the basement crawlspace, as dahlia bulbs prefer to overwinter at 40-60 degrees. 

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Figs! Mike and I also wrapped the fig tree this winter, trying something new that my neighbors do. They have a medium fig tree and it produces TONS of figs every year. They wrap it in pink house insulation and plastic after the first frost every year and that seems to be the key. So this year, we are trying the same thing with the Chicago Hardy fig in hopes of also creating a lovely high production fig tree. I trimmed all the excess suckers from the ground and we wrapped just the three main trunks that were the largest.

I recently moved a huge piece of the Brown Turkey Fig tree into a pot and put it in the greenhouse. It is still alive, if I can keep it alive all winter we might get figs from that next year too (and if not, I can try again next year, there's still a large piece of it in the ground here). So fingers crossed for a lot more figs next year! 

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The garden was half done by Thursday. I pulled up and chopped up the dahlias and zinnias to be picked up by our town's brush pickup because they had terrible powdery mildew and could not be composted. Only a few still-green things were left (besides the herbs) - chard, carrots, snapdragons and yarrow. 

I had big plans to finish it on Friday. Put down fresh black plastic and harvest the chard and carrots. Clean everything up and have the garden ready for winter in the nice weather.

Life had other plans. 

I woke up with strange abdominal pain on Friday. I rested, figuring it would pass. However it got worse and worse as the day wore on. I ended up in the hospital with acute appendicitis and was operated on Saturday morning. I woke up from surgery to the wonderful news about the election (silver lining!). I am still in shock about the whole thing - how I can go from a busy day of yardwork to being so ill so quickly? 

Since then, I'm home recovering. I'm a little bit better every day and this week I'm back on the computer. I'm not allowed to lift anything over 10 lbs for 6 weeks, which seems impossible, but at the same time I still can't even move much so it's probably totally reasonable. 

Mike tackled finishing the garden for me over the weekend while I "supervised" and didn't lift a finger. The boys helped too which was very sweet. I feel better having everything mostly put to bed for the season.  The rest of my to-do list will wait for a warm winter's day or the spring. I'm just so grateful that I got the tender dahlia bulbs dug up before all this happened.