This week has been a real choosing challenge for me. The dry summer kept my vegetables hibernating until the rain a couple of weeks ago when the plants woke up and started growing like crazy. All of the plants are alive and doing amazingly, even better than during the summer. Beans are flowering again, lettuces are growing, cabbages forming heads, even peppers are blooming and growing again. There’s only one problem with this: it’s digging time.

When your yard is surrounded by forest, and there’s no way for the machinery to plow the garden, the only way to turn the soil is by hand. I’ve been doing it for a decade now, and I know exactly how much time I need to do the whole garden. Usually, I start at the end of September, and by the end of October, I finish with the whole garden.

Digging with the soil turning is a hard job, even harder when done on a downhill garden. The digging itself is hard, but when you also have to constantly keep the balance, since the slope is pulling you down with each dig is really hard work. If we have lots of rainy days the things get even harder, due to the slippery surface. 

The reason why I try to finish by the end of October or early November is frost. As soon as we start having below 0°C temperatures, it takes only 2 or 3 days for the frost to freeze the top parts of the soil, making it impossible to dig. 

In normal years by this time my garden is already half empty, and there’s no problem with digging. The only veggies that survive September are usually on the sunny side, which is done last, so I have plenty of time to dig the shaded part and later harvest and finish with the sunny side.

This year is different, the garden is almost full, and I don’t have any beds that can be dug without removing the healthy veggies.

I was forced to make a difficult decision. I had to decide which veggies will be pulled out so that I could start digging and which will be left in the garden. 

I could have waited a bit more, but as it seems we have a Genoa cyclone forming. This means that we’ll have at least 7 days of continuous rain. After this rain, it will take at least 4-5 days for the garden to dry enough to be able to dig, which will already push us to late October. 

This is why I’ve been digging like crazy for the past 4 days, trying to do as much as I could. I’ve been forced to take out most of the carrots, parsley, and peppers that are in the shade.

Peppers in the sunny part of the garden will still give lots of fruits, so I left them and sacrificed the dozen of the shade peppers. 

The carrots, parsley, and beets that I took out are still fairly small, but I decided that it was better to take them out and prepare the beds for the next year than to leave them to grow bigger. These beds will be very hard to dig once wet, and the rainy period won’t make the carrots or beets grow too much.

I’ve also removed the pole beans, which were half dead and, dag this part too. The pole beans could have been left in the garden, but there’s an unwritten rule never to dig the upper beds first. When upper beds are dug first, due to the slope, it’s almost impossible to later connect the beds, and in the end, I get a hump in the middle of the garden. Digging the pole beans will allow me to dig the onion bed, which is already half empty.

With all the digging I’ve done the past couple of days, and some more I’ll hopefully have time to do tomorrow, I’ll have 1/4 of the garden ready for winter and spring. I’ll still have 8 more beds, and the whole upper green part to dig. The grass-covered upper part was left last year due to the Covid. I just didn’t have the time or the strength to do it. I’m hoping I will be able to return to full garden size next gardening year.