Some of the very things that make New England such a spectacular place to live, namely its ruggedly cold winters and sudden storms, also make its growing season painfully short. While my southern and west-coast friends are still enjoying a bountiful harvest, the Classical Roots Council and I are having to face the November music and begin shutting the vegetable garden down.
It’s a hard thing to say goodbye to certain plants, especially our tomatoes, which have been abundant right through the end of October thanks to this autumn’s relatively mild temperatures. But there’s also a strange satisfaction to winterizing a garden. The aesthetics of vegetable gardening, as Monty Don has said, mostly come down to clean lines and symmetry, and taking down your various plants and trellises leaves you with nothing but the squared outlines of the beds and the subtle earthtones of bare soil. By spring, we will certainly long for the acid-green shoots of new growth coming through but, for now, there’s a satisfying, spartan tidiness to it all.
Unless you want to fry and pickle your unripened green tomatoes, the should be added to the compost.
Shutting the garden down is a fairly straightforward process, yet there are a few helpful things to remember that may not be obvious to new gardeners. First and foremost, unless you plan to plant spring bulbs such as garlic in the overwintering beds, make sure to leave the root systems of this summer’s vegetable plants in the ground rather than digging them up. These will rot down in the soil during the cold season, adding looseness and depth. Simply cut the plants off at ground-level with snips and resist the temptation to do anything more.
Second, keep in mind that the influx of still-green vines, stems, and leaves that you’ll get from taking down your summer vegetable plants is the last major dose of carbon-rich material your compost heap will receive before next summer. It will all be nitrogen-dense brown scraps between now and then, so you want to take advantage of the richness by composting absolutely everything you can. Of course, lazy composting is better than no composting, so simply tossing your tomato vines, dead squash, and frostbitten zucchini into the heap and giving it all a good stir will do just fine. However, I’ve learned over the years that taking a few extra minutes to chop and hack the green material you’re adding to the compost heap is well worth it: scraps that are broken into small bits will compost exponentially faster so that you’ll have new mulch ready by next spring instead of next summer. And spring is when you’ll want it most.
To that end, I’ve taken to putting the bag on my gas lawnmower at home, dumping the green waste out of my garden cart onto the ground in front of the compost heap, and running it all over with the mower before I stir in the pulverized contents of the bag. It works beautifully and takes almost no time at all. If you don’t have a bag for your mower or don’t want to make such a mess, the alternative is to hack up the green waste with a hoe or shovel before you stir it in. Again, this step isn’t strictly necessary but the experienced gardener will find that they always want good compost as fast as possible.
Finally, once any plants you’re getting rid of have been removed, and provided that you aren’t planting garlic or cold-season greens, take a mattock or hoe and rough up the soul in the bed, leaving it in big uneven clumps for the winter snow and rain to break down. Doing so oxygenates the soil and opens it to receive the nutrients that get carried earthward with all that inclement winter weather. Snow is especially good at trapping nitrogen, which is of course excellent for garden soil, so leaving the weather to break down the clumped dirt is a good idea. Once spring sets in and the earth begins to warm again, you can scratch the aesthetic itch by raking it all into a clean and even surface.
Pumpkins make an excellent addition to the soil and should always be smashed and composted rather than bagged and thrown away.
As the light fades and the days shorten and cool, most of us will have fewer and fewer opportunities to spend significant time outdoors. Yet one of the grateful things about gardening is that it forces us out into the world even in the cold. And because the pace of our work in the garden will slow nearly to a halt once the snow sets in, this last burst of winterizing work is a chance to enjoy the fresh clean air, to appreciate the cycles that make all that summer abundance possible, and to help those cycles along just a little bit, when and where we can.