Let’s see, where we’re we last week? Do you want to put a garden in, this is America, yeah you have to bathe, your property, the neighbor’s cousin the therapist, mark out the garden with a hose, check with the lawn mower, blades unengaged, cut the sod, … Oh yeah! Time to pull the sod out!
Once all the sod removed, you’ve got two things to consider. Do I have a place to put this mound of sod or not? If you do, great! Go use it there. If not, you can dig trenches about ten inches deep, place the sod strips grass down (upside down) in the trenches, chop the sod as fine as you can with a hoe or similar tool and cover with the dirt you made the trench with. This will raise the level of your garden almost back to the level your grass was. And the sod will be composted by springtime, adding organic material to your Eastern Tennessee clay based soil.
Right now may be a little late to cover the garden with a 2-3 inch layer of cow or horse dung. (You know, I always thought dung was the past tense form of “ding”.) With the cooler weather coming in, you may not have enough warm months for the manure to compost. Anything around the yard would help. Grass clippings decompose fast. So are the Hussein brothers by now, but I wouldn’t suggest that as I’m sure whatever’s left of them is being considered toxic waste. Maybe some straw. A week or two of vegetable scraps. This can all get turned into the soil sometime in the late winter, early spring.
If you’ve had some compost going all summer in anticipation of next year’s garden, I’m impressed! This is a great time to throw it into the cleared out garden plot. I’d recommend putting the compost in the general area your rows and/or mounds will be going. Your best fertlizer needn’t be wasted on the ground you’ll just be walking on. Putting your finished compost into the garden in the fall also makes room for an autumn, winter and early spring compost build-up of wood ashes from the fireplace, vegetable scraps, coffee and tea grounds, more manure, grass clippings, the chopped up leaves from the fall, and on and on for next summer’s compost bake-off. Anything but meat and dairy products. If you have added those to your compost, you’d better make sure the prevailing winds blow towards the home of someone you’d really like to impress. Meat and dairy decomposing will add, shall we say, a distinct aroma to the breeze.
Once all that’s in place you can pretty much put it to bed for the winter. Cover the entire garden section with a good covering of straw to mulch it out. And wait ‘til spring.
All this advance preparing will definitely give you a hard start on next year’s gardening endeavors. You can wait until next year to pull the sod, but you won’t be able to bury it in your garden plot as it won’t have the time to compost. You’ll have to find another place to use it or dump it.
Next week, we’ll cover putting your existing garden to bed for the winter. Until then, go make life happen!

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