Today is the first of October?

Wow, where did the month of September go?  Fall is upon us and I've barely started the garden clean up.  To be fair, all the flowers are looking pretty darn good.  And the vegetable garden has been cleaned up  for nearly a month.  I was so thoroughly disgusted this year, I couldn't wait to be done with it.  I started with the tomatoes one night after dinner.  I just started picking what fruit was left on the plants.  And then I ripped them out.

The picture is kind of hard to see, but that one bowl of tomatoes and five trash bags represent 14 plants.  Pitiful.  Two days later, I went and did the same thing to the peppers.

This is even more sad.  That one bag has 21 plants in it!  It's a good thing I have extra hot sauce and chopped peppers in the freezer from last year.  To be fair, I was able to put 10 quarts of tomatoes in the freezer, so it wasn't a complete wash out.  And I didn't do a complete devastation of the garden until this past weekend.  The zinnias were just too amazing to tear them out right away.  I always put several of the State Fair variety of zinnias in with the veggies.  They bring in lots of pollinators!

They had such nice big, vibrant blooms this year!

And my Money Plant just keeps getting better.  It loves the garden!

Maybe I should just grow zinnias in my veggie garden, this pile is only 12 plants!

As you can see from the corner of the last picture, I have covered the majority of the garden with plastic.  What I'm trying to do is called soil solarization.  The idea is to super heat the soil up to kill off the weed seeds.

There was quite the debate online between clear plastic and black plastic.  I could have spent days reading through all the comments.  So, instead  I chose a slightly opaque clear plastic, only because is was cheap and I could get it at the neighborhood box store.  They're just 10' x 20' painting drop cloths.  I did have to cut a couple, but I only had to buy 4 of them.  If it works, great!  If not, I'm only out 12 bucks. Now watch, we won't have any sun at all until next June!


All is not bad news in the veggie world.  The hubby's ghost peppers are doing just fine!

I see lots of chili in our future!