Putting the garden to bed

So I had planned to post on this for quite some time now, but had been putting off taking pictures of the fall garden until it was 'done' Well, with the snow last week, 'done' was forced upon me, and the snow made end-of-fall pictures impossible! Normally I'm pretty good about taking lots of during photos, but not this time apparently (bad blogger!). Here are the last couple shots I have of the garden, very noticeably before harvest, from early October.

So then, here is what I did to put the garden to bed for the winter, minus pictures.

• Trimmed the raspberry bushes back so I could easily access the far end of the garden without getting mauled by their overgrown stalks!
• Hoed and raked out the weeds and dead plants throughout the entire garden, with the exception of the strawberries, raspberries, black raspberries, and garlic chives.
• Spread a layer of chicken manure over all the hoed up areas.
• Went back over everything and hoed the chicken manure back in (well, this didn't quite happen everywhere as the ground froze in the far end of the garden before I could finish. In fact, I wouldn't have even gotten as far as I did if I hadn't have drafted a visiting friend into helping me - thanks A!)
• Spread leftover dead plants (squash vines, corn plants, some weeds) back over the soil to decompose over the winter and add some nutrients back while providing a bit of soil cover
• Planted the garlic
• Mulched the strawberries, garlic, and garlic chives
• Wrapped plastic trunk wrappers around the apple trees in the bottom end of the garden

All told, I put 4 or 5 wheelbarrow loads of chicken manure on the garden, so I'm thinking next years plants will have lots of good soil to grow in. As I was working on putting the garden to bed for the winter, I thought about where next years crops would go, to make sure that I focused the manure in the right areas (corn, tomatoes), and didn't put as much on other areas (garlic), depending on what plants I planned to plant where.

In all likelihood, since I haven't started next years garden plan, by the time next spring comes, I'll have totally forgotten where I wanted the corn to go, but I just can't get up the motivation to start planning next years garden yet! I've still got some tomatoes out on the sunporch ripening slowly, I don't want to think about next year yet! Luckily we've got several months before I need to start thinking about ordering seeds, and several more before the garden is workable again. Here it is now with a nice snow coating on it. Since the sun won't hit the garden until sometime in February, I'm pretty sure this snow is going to stay put for quite some time :)