Autumn: harvesting, clearing and enjoying the garden
How to prepare your raised beds for winter and which vegetables to leave in place or remove. Plus discounts on selected seeds.
Clearing the raised beds for winter
Yes, winter time is here again. It gets dark early, we harvest by torchlight, there's plenty of rain and the occasional fierce storm.
We're still harvesting, though. It's less than a month ago, but that makes us appreciate what is still growing even more.
SonjaMM, one of the volunteer moderators in the community, wrote a wonderful post about it:
Enjoying the vegetable garden 🙂
Sonja writes:
From sunshine to rain and everything in between, there's still so much growing in the vegetable garden 😀
The endive is doing brilliantly, and we'll soon be able to harvest two rather large pointed cabbages. Several lettuce varieties are still growing in the raised beds and give us a weekly harvest. The cut-and-come-again kale is producing plenty, and the chard is showing off its beautiful rainbow colours again:
Sonja's MM raised beds in late October (photos by SonjaMM)
The snack cucumber keeps producing fruit too, and I harvested six small pumpkins.
Whenever I come back from our daily dog walk, I feel wonderfully happy when I look at the vegetable garden. What abundance 😇
Makkelijke Moestuin raised beds along the edge of Sonja's garden
Lovely, isn't it? This is only part of her post, and there are many more beautiful photos in the replies. It's well worth reading Sonja's community post.
That's one of the great things about the community: MM gardeners show what they're harvesting, what their raised beds look like and what is or isn't doing well. It's also the right place to ask questions.
What strikes me is how everyone is still happily gardening at this time of year, whether they have a few MM-Minis or a garden full of raised beds.
But however enthusiastic you are, the season is nearly over. That brings us to the next subject:
Prepare your Makkelijke Moestuin for winter
This is one of those jobs that often gets put off, at least by me. I'm too busy, don't feel like going outside, it's raining or something else suddenly needs doing. Yet it's actually very easy and doesn't take long.
remove old plants
clear weeds from your raised beds
loosen and aerate the MM-mix in empty squares
tidy away pots, labels, supports and tools
You can easily do it between showers:
Preparing the raised beds for winter between showers
Exactly when you clear your raised beds depends a little on the weather. Sometimes it freezes as early as October, while January can occasionally be so mild that it feels as though winter has been skipped altogether. Aim for November and you can't go far wrong.
Annkel has already made a start too:
Preparing raised beds for winter (photos by Annkel)
That's another lovely post to read: Annkel's community post. Like us, she doesn't remove every plant yet.
Because we're always looking for the very best seeds for our system, we add new varieties every year. We went from 20 to 57 varieties, and we think that's simply too many.
So we're discontinuing several, including stem lettuce and New Zealand spinach. The last packets are now available at 50% off.
We also have more stock than we need of a few other varieties, such as bush tomato and African marigold. Those are much cheaper now too.
More varieties will probably be added over the coming weeks, so check the seed shop regularly. Every discount helps, right?
Four seed packets currently available at a substantial discount
I hope there's still plenty for you to enjoy between the showers over the coming weeks: watching late-sown plants emerge, the beautiful autumn colours and, of course, a little more harvesting.
If you're harvesting small pumpkins, take a look at this recipe page in Dutch. It includes several tasty recipes, including roast apple and pumpkin soup.
