Millie and I are quite impressed with our level of preparedness this year. We just finished an indoor cold storage room in our basement and have harvested all our potatoes, carrots, beets, and various other sundry garden wares. We also were on the ball this year and had our garden tilled after depositing all the manure pile into the garden. We had a local equipment operator come in and haul the manure pile into our garden. The pile has been sitting there for about 6 months but we started it about a year ago. I was tempted to do it by hand but the $100 to haul and till the garden was well worth it. It would have taken me two days to shovel the six foot high by 12 x 6 foot pile. If you look carefully in the background you can see the source of this magnificent manure mound. She may look skinny but she sure does recycle an amazing amount of fertilizer. We loaded the whole pile onto our garden. I sure like the sky in our area. The smell from this side of the garden was a little bit sour but because of the composting nature of the contents it wasn’t all that bad. Could you imagine me doing that all by hand. Some things are worth paying for. While the tractor was delivering the dung Millie watered trees and enjoyed the view. Molly dressed up as little green riding hood and collected rosehips. After tilling up the moo mounds you can see the surface is smooth and fluffy. We only did one pass through the garden as we didn’t want to make the ground too fluffy or it might blow away with the high winter winds we are bound to experience this off season. I will probably put up a pallet fence half way through the garden to decrease the erosion and hopefully catch more snow for ground protection and water collection. As I said at the beginning of this post, Millie and I are not usually this on top of things. We still have a ton of things to do this fall to prepare for winter but it’s sure a great feeling to have a full storage room and the garden ready for spring.