Posted on 11/12/2022 6:40:05 AM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
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A mix of commercial and home-made ideas, here:
The Best Gardening Gifts to Give to the Gardener in Your Life
https://www.thespruce.com/best-gardening-gifts-4152987
Practical home-made ideas, here:
Gifts from the Garden
https://thekitchengarten.com/gifts-from-the-garden/
There's a cold front to the west, just crossing the mountains, & colder air is coming in behind that and Sunday will be 52/29 (first freeze of the season - bye bye garden). After Monday, it will be 40's/20's. I should mow today, but we got ¾ inch of rain in the last day & it's just too wet/muddy so I'll work on finishing my fence panels while it's warm - trying to deal with zip ties/tape in 40 degree weather might not be fun. I can always bundle up to mow.
Looking at the past week, Wednesday was the one day I had to get out & rake pine needles. Last Saturday, we had a pretty good breeze and the pine needles started coming down big time. We have giant, mature pines that are 80-90 years old and during the fall, Novemberish, they drop a lot of needles. There are 2 big garden chores in the fall …. one is getting the compost bin filled with leaves (done!) and the other is putting away enough pine needles to mulch the entire garden next spring. Than means at least 12 39-gallon trash bags. If I had to pick one project over the other, I'd pick pine needles to mulch the garden …. makes life SO much easier during growing season.
I use the mower to 'round up' the pine needles to make for less raking and I use a big old trash can as a bag holder. The spot where I store the bags needed re-doing since some more pallets had been stacked in there since last year & I didn't have enough room for stacking all the bags. That took a while & some heavy 'maneuvering', but now I have space on two good pallets for my bags & even some extra space.
It was a gorgeous day – not a cloud in the sky, cool and breezy. After 8 bags, I ran out, but got lucky and found 4 from last year that were in good enough shape to use so I did not have to stop and make a trip to the store. It was a really productive day and I'm very glad to have the pine needles ready to go next year.
Note: if you right click on the pics & select 'open image in new tab', it will show a larger picture.
Needles are thick enough to harvest after a week of coming down from the pines
Needles mowed & ready for raking
Bagging
First 6 bags in the barn; 12 bags total (2 rows) when I finished
I don't do this with pine needles, but wish I could – just gorgeous!
Carolyn Zeitler Pine Needle Basketry
Carolyn Zeitler: “I have been making round baskets for over 40 years. It is the nature of the technique that the stitching be made in a circular pattern. Lately I have been searching "beyond the boundaries" to "not" make circles but to use the same technique and make half circles, waves and hands reaching into the air. Working with copper is a delightful contrast to the texture of the pine needles; it is hard, yet soft, it can be smooth or textured, it can be hammered and cut, giving shape to a form that the pine needles can follow and emphasize. I hope you enjoy this new direction.”
That’s a lot of pine needles! I’ll bet it feels good to have that chore done. And they’re so useful, too!
We got our first dusting of snow, overnight. I just got the rain barrel drained fully, yesterday morning!
We have a large windbreak of Black Hills Spruce and White Pine intermingled across the north side of our property. It borders a farm field.
I love walking through there in the Fall when some of the White Pine needles are down and so fragrant underfoot! I’ve spend many hours trimming out wild grapevine and dead branches. It looks like a park back there, LOL! One chore I DON’T mind working on, actually.
Hi Everybody!
(((HUGS)))
I checked out that link. What beautiful work she has done with pine needles! Just gorgeous!
When I mowed the needles into piles, I had the mower set fairly high to keep the needles from getting cut up. When I mow grass, with the mower lower, the cut needles smell like turpentine ... I ‘love’ that smell .... it’s a Fall smell. There was the slightest smell of turpentine in the pole barn with the bagged needles - some got cut with the mower, just enough for that faint hint of Fall!
Our old, huge pines are like a ‘park’ in some places ... I call it Nature’s Cathedral - they’re beautiful. We had a forester out to look at them a couple of years ago & he aged them for us. I wonder what those trees have ‘seen’ in their lifetimes ... for the last 55 years, it’s been ‘us’ (that’s how long we’ve had the place).
Here in coastal North Carolina with my mix of trees, lawn/leaf bagging begins about October 10 and continues at a constant rate until about April. Our maples, that are meant for colder climates, take all fall and winter to drop their leaves in this climate. They also only turn yellow. Likewise the drop from Willow Oak, Pine and Black cherry go all season.
What I do is have mower service, blade and bag setup done at the first of October as I will be dealing with this for the whole winter.
One year I made lemon verbena liqueur as gifts, and learned later that few of the recipients enjoyed it as much as I did. Made me wish I hadn’t given it all away. I had a great harvest that year, but they haven’t been so great since then. Funny, how when you realize your efforts aren’t appreciated, that you resort to ordinary things. I’m not sure I will give homemade gifts very often going forward. Perhaps to just a few.
Thanks, Pete!
Salad table: lettuce, scallions, radish, carrot seedlings loved the periodic soaking rains from Nicole, along with cooler weather. Easy removal of leaf litter from the salad table.
Getting ready to plant a couple more tomatoes into Earthbox today. Turnip seeds into planter bags. Re-potting eight tomato seedlings.
Happy Gardening!
We’re on a farm with NO neighbors, so what I don’t rake up to use on the garden beds, I just leave for hibernating critters and the ‘good bugs.’
When I had a house in town, I had two HUGE Silver Maples. They shed leaves like nobody’s business and some years I had fallen leaves piled up knee-high even before raking them.
I do NOT miss that chore at all. :)
Reminds me of the year that my Step-Dad made Limoncello for us all. It was fan-tastic!
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/32451/limoncello/
Sounds wonderful! So glad things survived for you.
I am DONE for the season, other than salad greens growing in my unheated greenhouse. We had out first dusting of snow last night. Much more of THAT lies ahead! ;)
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