Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details.When readying the garden for winter is a matter of life and death by J. G. Fabiano Autumn is part of a vital cycle of life for anyone who has a garden. This is the time we pull up all the plants we cherished, fed, and protected for the last five months of the year. During the summer we were proud of the way our gardens looked. We waited patiently for the plants to grow so we could fill our family’s tables with delicious, garden fresh vegetables and sweet scented flowers. But, it is now time to put thoughts of summer behind us and get our gardens ready for their long winter hibernation. Walking out into my garden after the first frost I was saddened to see my tomato plants had turned black and were now lying limply on the ground with clusters of brownish green tomatoes still attached. In fact, the ground was littered with tomatoes that had never made it into our sandwiches and salads of the summer just past. They did, however, make it into my clothes because as soon as I stepped into y garden I slipped on the squishy bed of rotten tomatoes and got tomato slime all over me. Getting up and scraping the goop from my pants I began the task of separating the dead tomato plants from the cages that surrounded them. When my tomato plants had been in full bloom you couldn’t even see the cages through the thick foliage of leaves and fat, sun ripened tomatoes. Throughout the summer I had unrolled miles of twine to keep my giant tomato plants from falling to the ground. This made cleaning much more difficult because I now had to separate the dead plants from the cages and the miles of twine. For someone else, maybe, this would be an easy task. But, for me it took over an hour to separate the plants from the cages because, over the last six months, I had tied the plants and the cages together with all manner of creative knots in order to ensure that no tomato would fall from its vine. This became a lot harder when I accidentally knocked my glasses off and proceeded to step on them, mangling them beyond repair and pushing them deep into the muck of mud and crushed tomatoes. Rather than search for them and risk cutting my fingers I decided to leave them there. This meant that I cut at least six fingers flailing around for the metal garden stakes that held the tomato cages to the ground and then pulling them up. My next line of attack was the dead bean plants that had been destroyed by the nighttime frost. I thought this would be easy because cages were unnecessary and all I had to do was pull up the dead plants. This went along pretty well until I felt a small itch on y right forearm. At first I didn’t think much of it but by the time I got to my third line of beans, even through my blurred vision, I noticed my right arm was twice the size of my left arm. Obviously something had bitten me and I was having an allergic reaction. Anti-histamine was administered by my wife who then went back in the house to check out my life insurance policy. Trying to ignore the itching and stinging in my arms I plunged back into my little suburban garden. The peppers were next to be added to the giant pile of dead plants I was building on the edge of my garden. I assumed the peppers would be easy until I attempted to pull up my first plant. It did not move. Unlike the tomato plants, which easily gave way, this particular pepper plant was made of tougher stuff and had decided it did not want to join the compost pile at the end of my garden. After a few moments of pulling and tugging without success I decided to go into the garage to get a shovel so I cold dig the pepper plants out. This seemed like a logical move because, how deep could pepper roots be? After 20 minutes of digging I still was not able to pull the pepper plant away from the ground so I started clawing at the root base only to feel an even more insistent stinging sensation. The stinging was flowed by an angry buzzing as I discovered that yellow jacket bees make their hives in the ground. I also found out they are not happy campers when somebody sticks his hands into their home. After I had beat a retreat into the house and taken a few more hits of anti-histamine my hand shrank back down to something the size of a hors’s hoof. A very red horse’s hoof. I decided the dead pepper plants would make a nice winter display in my garden. About an hour later I had finally worked my way to the other side of the garden and all that was left to pull out were the deadened zucchini and summer squash plants. Pulling them up was easy because they had few roots left to hold them to the ground. The only really interesting discovery I made was of a new and strange kind of but that lived under the dead squash leaves. It didn’t look like any normal bug because it was geometric in shape and had long thick legs. My next interesting discovery was that it had a mouth and it liked to bite. Knowing I was already filled to the brim with Ibuprofen and anti-histamine I just kept pulling the squash and zucchini plants out from the garden, knowing that if this new alien bug had the capacity to kill me it probably would. It did not. It just made my hand sting well into the end of the following week. What I thought would take me an hour ended up taking me the entire day. My wife decided to go out because, as she told me later, she couldn’t stand watching me commit suicide by using the garden as the weapon of choice. I was finally ready to cover my garden with the mounds of grass cuttings I had saved throughout the summer. I do this every year in the hope the cutting will rot away and replenish the nutrients the plants have sucked up during the growing months of summer. As I picked up fat clumps of grass cuttings to spread over the garden I noticed long black stringy things clinging to the grass. Instinctively I threw them to the ground then bent down to try and see what they were. My eyes might not have been much help but my nose was. I realized the neighborhood animals had been using my grass cuttings pile as their communal commode. Autumn is part of a vital cycle of life for anyone who has a garden. I just wish its preparation for winter didn’t have to almost kill me. The End.
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