WINNEMUCCA - My daughter Lindsey and I were taking a walk with Beth the other day, looking at the way people had decorated for Halloween. Some of the comments Lindsey made seemed to be drawing an unfavorable comparison between my décor and that of the neighbors.
"Hey," I said. "I've nearly every element in my yard that we've seen so far, except the scarecrow."
"Your yard is pretty scary," Beth said. "And you do so have scarecrow. I'm sure I saw one the other day in your yard, wearing a shabby straw hat, tattered jeans and an old shirt that flapped in the wind. It had a bit more straw than usual, though."
"I think that was Mom," Lindsey said.
Martha Stewart probably wouldn't approve of my garden attire, and she definitely wouldn't approve of my current garden décor, although it is true that I've all of those characteristic fall elements. The difference is in the arrangement.
In the typical yard, you'll see bales of hay, with elaborately carved pumpkins arranged on and around them, perhaps nestled into piles of colorful autumn leaves. You'll find cornstalks tied in neat shocks, and fake cobwebs arranged artistically on porch railings.
My pumpkins and the rest of my winter squash are mostly stashed in a cool closet, but I had a bumper crop this year. As the leaves died back, I discovered delicatas and kabotas and even pumpkins that I overlooked when I gathered them just ahead of the first big frost. The damaged ones I've left in the garden. If you squint, some of those cracks do look like carvings.
I've got plenty of fall leaves, too, although most of mine are more crunchy brown instead of orange, yellow and red. The squash and beans are pretty desiccated by now, and the rest of the garden is only waiting for a really hard freeze to add to the general shabby air.
I'm thinking I can keep my "décor" in place until after Thanksgiving. Then I'll have to clean up. The squash I'll dole out to the chickens, and I'll compost the leaves. Garden litter can harbor disease, and squash bugs overwinter as adults in debris. I've already killed a few of the when I moved some plywood.
The cornstalks I'll pile in a corner somewhere. I don't have a chipper, and cornstalks take a long time to deteriorate in compost. However, I plan to use them as mulch under my tomatoes and beans next year. I fought fungus with my beans this summer, and those stalks might keep the beans up off the dirt, and away from fungal spores. It's worth a try.
My straw isn't neatly baled; most of it is still on the potatoes. I use my potato patch as a lazy woman's way to expand the garden. I just rough up the soil a bit if it's compacted, and spread manure on it, and then a thick layer of straw, and I plant the potatoes under the straw, directly on the manure. I make sure that I put in a few earthworms, and they and the straw mulch does the work of tilling the soil.
I'll either turn the straw under, or just move it aside and plant squash or corn. Much of it is already rotten, and the top layer that isn't will mulch next year's crop, even as it continues to rot and enrich the soil.
My favorite part of gardening is when the easy thing to do is also the right thing to do.
The fake cobwebs in my yard are actually strips of floating row cover I tied on PVC hoops which spanned my tomatoes. Although they may have looked a little tacky, at least until the Halloween season legitimized them, they shaded the tomatoes. Now that the weather is frosty, I throw blankets and more row cover over those hoops. As long as the weather holds, I can still harvest tomatoes. Meanwhile, I can't take off the strips I attached earlier, because the blankets cover them.
I'm covered on garden clean-up until after Thanksgiving. If I can think of a way to use the debris as Christmas decoration, I can put it off until after the first of the year.
Hey - they have straw in mangers, don't they? I think I'm on to something.
When Teresa Howell isn't decorating her yard, she teaches English at Great Basin College.
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