Garden cleanup and moving pond fish

Hello, and welcome to my page, eh!

We've been having a bit of nice fall weather for the past couple of days and I've been attempting to get some things done around the yard before our next bout with crappy weather starts. Today seemed like a pretty good day to do more garden cleanup. I pulled out the rest of the bean plants from the raised bed and the container garden and put all of the plants in my utility trailer to haul to the compost site. I thought about running them through the shredder, but there's a lot of half dried up beans on the plants and I don't want those seeds all over the garden to sprout next spring.

After getting that area cleaned up, I started on the remaining tomato plants in the raised bed. There was still a fair amount of tomatoes on the plants, but the previous week of rainy weather had not helped anything, they were full of bad spots. I ended up just picking them into a couple of buckets to get rid of them. Then I pulled out all the plants and the weeds that were left and loaded them into the trailer also. I left all the marigolds in the raised bed because the bees are still feeding on them, and they look nice. I won't shred weeds because of the seeds, and there wasn't much left of the tomato plants, plus, putting them into the mulch can spread diseases such as blight.

The before picture.

The after picture.

I'm going to have to fill up the gas tank on the shredder and get it going again, I have a big pile of corn stalks to work through before it starts snowing.

I've also started the process of getting the pond fish out of their ponds and into the winter tank. I set up the 100 gallon stock tank in the greenhouse again, like last winter. It worked well for keeping the fish alive then, so I'm going to do it again this winter. I started by getting the tank set up in it's corner in the greenhouse, and putting the insulation between the tank and the 2 outer walls that the tank is set against.

I used the sump pump to fill this tank from the little pond by the porch that I wanted to get the fish out of first. Using the water that they've been in all summer is the best way to transfer the fish to the other tank.

After getting the greenhouse tank filled, I pumped the rest of the water out to the street. It's much easier to catch the fish when there's only about 2 inches of water in the bottom of the tank.

Once I got the fish transferred to the greenhouse tank, I set the filter system up on that tank to keep the water moving. It's better for the fish if you don't let the water get stagnant in a smaller pond. The filter is really nothing more than a small aquaponics setup with a couple of papyrus plants in it. The plants are pretty sad looking because they were within reach of the local deer for most of the summer. Apparently, the deer around here are willing to eat papyrus plants, along with pretty much everything else they can get to.

I won't worry about insulating the rest of the tank until it starts getting cold enough outside to make it cold in the greenhouse.
I'm getting pretty close to being done with the garden work for this year, except for shredding the corn stalks, and the leaves when they start to pile up on the ground.

Well, that's about all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!