Kitchen Garden Clean-up

Today I tackled one of my least favorite tasks of the Fall season; cleaning up the kitchen garden. This task was made a bit easier by today's weather - overcast and a very mild 68 degrees. I had already harvested all of the Winter Squash, Onions,  Morning Glory seed, and Tomatoes. It was now a "simple" matter of picking up all of the spent plant material as well as the assorted cages, towers, and plant markers.

As always, it took me much longer than I had expected! Here's the view once my work was completed.

I assumed that the only vegetable that would remain in the garden would be the two "Tuscano" kale. However, the "Galina" yellow cherry still looks good. The 10-day forecast seems mild, so I thought that I would leave it in and see if I could get one more harvest out of it before the first frost.

I am waiting to harvest any kale until the first frost or two. All my gardening books indicate that the kale will become much sweeter after it is exposed to a period of freezing temperatures.

Like so many plants, Kale is architecturally interesting.

There are still many tresses left on the "Galina" cherry that have yet to mature.

Here's the "compost" pile of assorted plant material. I know that the deer will quickly discover this  vegetation and make quick work of cleaning it up. They love tomato plants.

While I worked alone for much of the afternoon, I did have this sweet little bird supervise me for a while. I was able to get quite close to it and it just calmly remained perched on the garden fencing. On the other end of the "assistance" spectrum were these three slugs. Absolutely no help what so ever!