Raised Bed Fall garden rehab.

[idum]

I had let my garden go wild for a while. Between a very wet year and then hurricane Irma flooding everything, I just let it go.
I generally have a pretty good garden through the winter as it's cool enough to grow nice lettuce, spinach, broccoli, kale and other cool season crops.

Here's a picture of some of the weed choked beds and a look at them after some cleanup.

 

[idum]

My property is low and can get and stay wet so I need to have raised beds to keep the veggies feet dry.
I used to work with commercial door work and ended up with some used (and useless) heavy gauge steel doors. I ended up cutting the old doors in half lengthwise and building raised beds from them.

The chickens are usually kept out of the garden but I let them in to help with the cleanup. Tina Turkey helps too. Tina is a wild turkey hen that adopted us a couple of years ago.

 

[idum]

I planted some new starts of mainly lettuce and the chickens found their way in and pretty much wiped them out by mostly just eating the leaves. About half will come back and be fine. I did plant some new starts to replace the worst damaged ones.

The last pics are from last winters garden. I hope to do as well this year.

 

[TerriHaute]

Nice pictures, I love Tina! I let my garden go too, we had a lot of rain at the end of the summer and other life events took precedence. We had the first hard freeze last week and I was finally able to spend yesterday working on garden cleanup. I pulled out all the tomato cages and stakes, picked the last of the dent corn, and put away the bean poles. There is still plenty of lettuce, kale, and Swiss chard to eat and DH will mow over the rest on the next dry day.

It's almost time to mow grass and suck up the leaves in the yard, and all that will be dumped on the garden to compost over the winter. Chicken coop cleanings will go out in the garden all winter as well as coffee grounds. I started saving coffee grounds this summer since we drink a lot of coffee now that DH is retired. It turns out they are high in nitrogen and the rabbits don't like them. I put coffee grounds in a circle around my fall sugar snap peas and the rabbits left them alone!