the garden may be put to bed....

up and out early to campus to check on the mulch in the community garden...one week in and it seems well...the fabric on the strawberry bed and on the garlic/jerusalem artichoke bed is fine...the mulch n the mulch on the garlic in the old hopi blue maize bed is so well protected that i don't think it will have any issues...i had the melancholy task of taking out the expired cherry tree today...sad but it will be attracting insects and fungi we don't want around come spring so unfortunate as it is it had to go...perhaps a hardier replacement is in the offing...i found a lot of oak leaves in the beds near the oak tree ( what a shocker!) and while they aren't much of an issue in this small an amount i think i will be removing them anyway...they are alive with tannins but that isn't really an issue since we don't have any livestock that might eat them and be adversely affected...what they do have is a fair amount of tannic acid and in large enough quantities they can turn the soil acidic and inhospitable to many plants..so out they go, organic or not...any acorns we find too...we don't need more shade here...the bottom photo is the community garden about eight this morning...fall is here.