Gardening in November?!

I've got a definite theme going with some of the books I've been reading lately. The list includes The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollen; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver; The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen; and the best one of all, This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader by Joan Dye Gussow. I know I'm too busy to do a big garden next summer, but I want to rededicate myself to my existing vegetable garden which has languished the past 3 summers because of our demanding schedules. I would like to try to produce more of our food. Not just a few dinners or side dishes here or there, but really try to make the most out of my garden space. Since I've had such limited time for the garden, the first thing on my agenda is to amend and enhance the soil. What I did today is to layer newspaper over my garden and covered it all up with crunched up leaves. It is a beautiful fall day today, the sun is shining and the temperature is very mild! It felt so nice to go outside and get my muscles moving and blood pumping. Of course I have pictures!

Above you see my main vegetable garden. We had to fence it in to keep out rabbits and other critters that roam our neighborhood.

Along our fence I have a mix of flowers, vegetables, and herbs. This is much more like a cottage garden and I enjoy the way it looks much more so than the fenced portion.

We have been trying to buy locally produced foods as much as possible for the last 2 years. My milkman lives on a hobby farm and raises chickens that we buy each summer. They are field raised and humanely butchered and they taste wonderful! He is offering grass fed lamb right now, so I have ordered a whole lamb that is at the butcher. I have a good store of chickens and, soon, lamb meat in my freezer pantry! It just feels right that our food is seasonal and local. Of course we're not perfect and we also have a budget to consider, but I believe that anything I do to reduce our dependence on industrial agriculture helps our health and our planet.