End of summer garden maintenance.

Since I've got plenty of tomatillos and my tomatoes are done, I decided to clear out two of my raised beds.

I left some oregano in the corner of the one bed.

I know when I initially filled the raised beds they were full.  The soil must have settled.  Nearly every bed is low.  Luckily Home Depot had garden soil on sale for Labor Day.  I picked up 12 bags.  It probably won't be enough but it'll do for now.  I should have more compost ready to use in the spring.  I'll use it to fill whatever I can't get done now.

 I think I added 3 bags to this bed.  The bed that had the tomatoes wasn't too bad so I let it be.  It's possible that all of the leaves in there made it look more full than it was. 

My next project was filling my 3x4 bed.  I went around my yard and found all of my container plants.  The ones that were done are nearly dead (herbs mostly) got dumped into the raised bed.  I'm not sure how well this will work.  Some of those containers had a lot of root mass.  I could stand on the little pot shaped mounds of dirt and they didn't break apart.  I'm hoping that they break down and decompose over the winter. 

The soil from two of my self watering buckets went in here too.

Here's the stack of empty pots.  I plan to fill them with fresh soil and move them to the greenhouse.

I dumped the soil from two of my self watering 5-gallon buckets into the 3x4 raised bed.  It was interesting to see what they looked like inside.  Both buckets were full of really wet soil.  It was like really thick mud.  The tomatillos that were in them didn't do well at all.  There were hardly any roots.  I'm guessing that I didn't use the right kind of soil in them.

The one bucket didn't hold up well at all.  I threw it out.  If I decide to use them again next year I'll have to make a new one.

 I used 2 bags of garden soil to fill in the rest of the bed.

I had been storing a lot of my container plants in my most recent 4x8 bed.  I moved them out so I could add 3 bags of garden soil to it.

This means that my container plants are back in my driveway. 

Oh well, at least there are fewer of them now.

I put 4 bags of garden soil in my garage for later use.  I know my 2x4 bed needs additional soil, but right now it's full of beans.  I also need to fill all of the containers that I emptied.  And I'm going to need soil for starting seeds next year.  Yes, it's barely September and I'm already thinking about starting seeds next year.