Between seasons : a time for harvesting, pruning and restoring

This week, after the bright sun returned and the mountains turned redder than ever, autumn made itself felt even more. So, we took advantage of the good weather to organize this transitional period which will allow us to get everything ready for winter. For example, we learned how to prune trees properly so that they can resist the winter and resume growth in the spring, in particular by using a cream that protects the cut areas from moisture ingress.

We also harvested the last summer vegetables from the garden and greenhouse which are no longer ripening on the plants, to make them ripen in the sun inside the house and arranged in cases with apples, which stimulate their own ripening thanks to ethylene and allow the other vegetables near them to benefit from this natural process.

Once the last harvests have been done in the greenhouse, we cut down the summer vegetable plants so that we could replace them with winter ones ; we therefore prepared the soil, ready to welcome new seedlings.

Under the big walnut tree, we also had to spend time collecting all the golden leaves that had fallen from the tree ; indeed, these leaves contain a molecule called juglone which poisons all other plants and prevents them from growing, leaving room only for future walnut trees. So as we want to grow crops under this tree, we must remove these dead leaves !

Finally, after the heavy rains of the previous days and the leaks they caused in the house, we understood even more the importance of maintaining roofs ; so we cut all the tree branches close to the roofs, then swept all the fallen leaves off the tiles and emptied the plant debris from the gutters. We also spent many hours taking care of the century-old roofs, which tend to be covered with moss and where grass even grows between the tiles, spreading them apart from each other and causing major damage inside.

Maya