Putting the garden to bed

Frost, and I mean real frost, has finally hit my garden. My valiant tomato plants have bit the dust. I've never had tomatoes this late before. In fact, this has been almost 6 weeks past the usual bite the dust date. Very unusual. But I knew it was coming, so over the weekend, the kids and I pulled out most of the tomato plants in the raised veggie beds, and in the front bed. Now I just have to finish weeding them completely, and I will try an overwintering adaptation of the lasagna bed technique. I used this early spring in one bed, as a trial, and it worked wonderfully. Kept the weeds out like nobody's business.

The basic idea is to smother weeds with newspaper, cardboard, other bio-degradable papers. What I did this spring was to layer compost, overwintered-soon-to-be composted leaves from the previous fall, and general garden waste in the bed, about ten inches or so. I then covered it all with about six to eight sheets thick of newspaper, and then on top of that, three to four inches of garden topsoil/composted lamb-cow-whatever manure. The idea is that the worms will pretty much eat all the garden waste, all the way up to and including the newspaper, leaving you with rich soil, and all the while smothering any weeds. Seemed to do the trick. I wasn't sure how happy the toms would be, in all that not quite composted stuff, but they didn't seem to mind at all. And when I was pulling out the plants, I saw more worms than I think I ever have. A win-win all around. I am going to try the same idea this winter in the other beds, minus the top layer of soil/compost. I'll save that for spring. I'll just add more leaves to the top to keep the newspaper from flying away, and see what it looks like come spring.

Oh, one thing I forgot to add, water the whole thing really well. Up here in Quebec, hopefully we'll get a really good snow cover, but even then, water will help the breakdown of the garden stuff (leaves, compost, etc,) and the newspapers.