A Busy Day

I decided to take the apparently last nice day of weather of the year and get some end of the season maintenance done.  Last night when the girls and I were driving home, I saw these beauties on the side of the road.  "Look girls." I said,  Essie squealed, "Oh, LEAVES!" I love that I'm raising a new generation of tree huggers.  =)

I fired up the ole mulcher/shredder and turned these 9 bags of leaves into

beautiful, shredded leaves (which compost much faster)

and are also good entertainment for the girls

my Romas are still producing (crazy plants) but with the forcast showing freezing temps for the next week, I decided it was time to clean up the beds and get them ready for next year

The little, white "fingers" on the plants above and below are roots.

I read on-line that its better not to stake your tomatoes but allow them to grow horizontally & they will lay more roots, which makes for healthier plants.  Since I grew them in mulch, I had no trouble with rotting tomatoes, like you do with tomatoes grown in dirt.  It did make it harder to harvest so I think next year I will stake off walking paths around the plants

This is 1 plant-CRAZY

root base of same plant

chickens enjoying some of the "not worthy to eat" tomatoes

what a pile of plants

I let the girls out for a bit to explore the reclaimed soil

I decided to layer the spent plants with some of the shredded leaves to make one big, compost pile. I didn't really have a good place outside the garden to put it so figured why not just put it in the garden and then it will be easy to spread it out in the spring too!

I added a nice, thick layer of shredded leaves to the tomato bed

and covered it with mulch (to keep the leaves from blowing away)

The girls had to check out the freshly covered bed

and the new compost pile

Now what do I do with all of these?

and these???