It was a beautiful Saturday morning. Cool, but not too cool and the sun shining. Just ideal for closing the Garden at Fritz down for the winter. A rough count reckoned between 16 and 18 gardeners and come to help – mostly the regular volunteers who have worked all season but augmented by a half dozen young chaps from Loyola school doing their community volunteering, and showing a great work ethic as they shoveled and raked and dug and gardened. It would have been nice to have seen some other people from the community – in previous years we have been joined by several one-off workers eager to help but, for whatever reason, that was not the case today.
But enough people to really get the garden into shape.
We had asked the town for some compost as the soil is in need of replenishing with some organic material and they came up trumps with several well placed loads of black and crumbly compost to work with. That meant shovelling it into barrows, distributing it over the beds and raking it in – heavy work. The pictures below show how well it all went.
Other jobs involved lifting and storing the geotex membranes, stacking the tomato stakes and digging out errant grass and weed clumps. All the trees in the orchard were also mulched and their lower trunks wrapped with protection against rabbit teeth in the winter to come – they love bark.
Congratulations to everyone who came – and to Patricia for organizing coffee and cookies.
(In the gallery, click any thumbnail to see the images at full size)
Garden at Fritz / Jardin à Fritz 