October is the month when most gardeners hang up the hoe, stow the shovel and prepare to hibernate. Most gardeners are burnt out. Over it. Not us. Well, not the Boss. Yeah, I’m running out of steam. But the Boss is on it. He’s the one keeping the motor running – the tiller motor, that is. There’s still lots of planting to do around here.

The earth is turning away from the sun. It’s hard to think about putting things into the ground when everything is dead and brown and ready to be pulled out. There is no way I’d be able to keep the momentum up without the Boss. My stamina for gardening is waning. He’s the one keeping us on task so we have things to look forward to in the spring: fresh lettuce and spinach after a winter of crappy store bought lettuce, beds of colorful tulips welcoming us home after a dark winter, and garlic tops sprouting out of the earth. It all seems so far away.

The fleet has been deployed. This year the Boss built raisers for the cold frames so the goods can get taller. I sure hope they are filled to the brim in the Spring.

Five beds of lettuce and spinach get planted with the hope that it will hibernate in the winter. We take all the spinach and lettuce seeds we’ve got left and put them all into the ground. Better there than sitting in a box. Then we cover them with cold frames. Or, as the Boss says, “Time to deploy the fleet.” When we return, we’ll (hopefully) have greens waiting for us. If we’re lucky. Some years we come back to cold frames filled with lovely green leaves and I am overjoyed. Some years we return to nothing but dirt in the cold frames and I am sad.

If I’m sad about not having lettuce, then I can always count on the tulips to cheer me up. The Boss gifted me 200 tulip bulbs for my birthday about five years ago, which turned into 2000 bulbs. So we expanded to two beds of tulips and wow how lovely they are! So, we decided this year we’ll do three beds, oh how awesome will that be?! Until the Boss had to dig up the old tulip bulbs, that took days of tedious work. So we’ll only be doing two beds of tulips. But I did order a few new colors to add to the mix. I need more purple in my life.

Garlic beds tilled and waiting patiently to be planted.

Garlic gets planted in the fall. Typically the end of October in our part of the world. We haven’t planted the garlic yet. It’s been an extra warm fall and we don’t want the garlic getting too excited before the frost. It’s going in about two weeks later than usual. We’ll put about 1,200 bulbs in the ground — into six well fed and manured beds. Then it gets covered in a pile of leaf mulch and is tucked in all cozy for the winter. Don’t want it to freeze. Garlic takes nine months to do its thing. In the early spring, a gardener friend will make a trip out to our place to pull the mulch off the garlic so the greens can spring forth.

It takes dedication, getting busy this time of year so we can have some goodness waiting for us in the spring. Yet, as the Boss enthusiastically points out as he hauls manure and tills beds, “We are already off and running for next year with a big chunk of the garden already planted!”