Winter is coming

Not to get all "Game of Thrones" on you, but we did a lot of work on the farm last weekend to get ready for winter. Forecast for this weekend looks like it might freeze Saturday night, so we brought in the last of the peppers:

Pretty good haul. Lots of them were still green, but by no means all:

Made about 12 half-pings of hot sauce with a bunch, still busy drying the rest to grind into hot pepper. Because we are relocating the beds next spring to the north end of my farming partner's property, we had to take everything out, including this, the squash and zuchinni enclosure:

Once the stakes and fencing were down, of course the dogs all had to run around in the formerly forbidden bed:

My partner already yanked the tomato plants, but I took a metric shit ton of tomatoes, turned a bunch into several quarts of jarred tomatoes, got a bunch more ripening on the window sill, and a bunch more green tomatoes that I have to turn into relish or chutney or something.

We pulled a bunch of the bed boxes Saturday, using the front-end loader on the tracker to lift the boxes up, then carry them over to be stacked for drying over the weekend:

Once the beds were lifted, we had to tote them to the storage area. Naturally, Farmer Tom drives the tractor, 'cause it's his, while I walk alongside to keep the box from falling off:

We got a bunch of them stacked on Saturday:

Pulled the rest and stacked them on Sunday:

The oldest bed suffered a catastrophic structural failure when we tried to lift it. Pretty rotten, but we should be able to salvage the liner and lag bolts. I think the wood is toast:

After we quit Saturday, Farmer Tom scraped the bed sites and moved the dirt:

All that dirt went into one big-ass pile of dirt:

Of course, that pile is going to get a whole lot bigger when we move the rest of the dirt -- about half is still out there:

We'll let the bed frames dry out over the winter, and come early spring we'll make repairs as needed, probably build a new box or two, then get them positioned in a location with better all-day sun. Plus, I've convinced Farmer Tom to let me put in a few rows of corn. Should be an exciting spring, which, I suppose, is more than we can say for this post. Well, this isn't a gardening blog except when I say it is, so if you don't like it, refer to the title of the blog.

("He can be so nasty," one Eff You reader said to another one.
"I think he's just upset because no Mongolians have come by," said the other. "He does feature the most modern yurt construction techniques, after all."
"Darn," said the first Eff You reader. "I was hoping he just needed to be saved by the love of a good woman."
"No, I think he's hoping for a hot naked babe," said the second reader.)

The things I do to try and drive traffic.