How do you make your garden cleaning chores more fun?

[RinTinTin]

With a December frost, you still have time to get in a nice crop of snow peas: about 50 days from seed to eat. Last planting about 4 weeks before frost - they'll get 12-18", then go dormant. As soon as the ground warms up in spring, they'll take off again. While your neighbors are planting theirs, you'll be watching for flowers.

[bughunter99]

Like this:

1. Enlist the help of the munchkins for about an hour.
2. Go in house and make large pitcher of iced tea to avoid yelling at munchkins.
3. Bring excellent tune selection outside with tea.
4. Dismiss munchkins to go play Wii and enjoy working solo with tunes and tea until around 2pm when munchkin tummy rumbling over-rides the magic of the Wii.
5. Post lunch pat self on back for not murdering munchkins and getting so much done and waste the rest of the day under a blanket reading!

[Tormato]

More fun?

Well, imagining I'm in Bizzaro World is about the only way.

[dice]

Everything looks so clean and organized afterwards, that has
a certain satisfaction. Because I want to get as much cover
crop growth as possible before they go dormant for the winter,
I am always champing at the bit to get seeds planted in the
holes where the plants were, so once they are pulled I can
finally do that and stop worrying about whether they will
be well enough established to survive the winter and
hungry squirrels.

(I started in mid-August for the paths between the rows, and
those plants are looking good, but I like to get some winter
annual beans or vetches growing right in the planting holes,
too, where compounds exuded from their roots can go to
work on the handfuls of rock phosphate that were worked
into the soil under each plant at plant out.)

[Tania]

Dice,

This is so true! I am ~25% through the cleanup, and it is already getting visibly cleaner and prettier.

Our weather has been certainly a complication this year (too much rain lately), and the soil is very saturated. Another complication is that everything is so late, that I am hesitating to pull many plants yet, hoping they'd continue to ripen a bit more fruits (i.e. peppers and melons), so I am risking getting to far into the late fall before I plant my winter rye... More rain is expected this week.

[dice]

Originally Posted by Tania

Another complication is that everything is so late, that I am hesitating to pull many plants yet

Same here. I am still getting tomatoes ripening, and
there are a lot of green tomatoes on some plants that
just need a couple of nice days to blush.

I have bell beans and hairy vetch in the paths, with some alsike
clover and winter dormant alfalfa mixed in. Those plants are
going to be fine over the winter. Last year one bed had a
well-established cover crop despite planting most of it after all
of the plants were pulled, but in another, larger bed, squirrels
ate a lot of the emerging bell beans and some of the vetch,
and coverage was rather sparse. (I could see little holes all
over it where they had been mining seeds and seedlings with
most of the seed still attached.) That allows more soil compaction
from winter and spring rains [edit:], and it reduces the winter/spring
rhizosphere available for winter habitat for beneficial bacteria and
mycorhizzae.[/edit]

The tomato plants in the first bed with the good cover crop growth
last winter and spring grew better this year than the tomato plants
in the bed where last year's winter cover crop was decimated
by squirrels.