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pp51armstrong

Cleaning up Neglected Garden

pp51armstrong
8 years ago

Hey! I'm new to the community and new to gardening. My wife and I just bought a house, and the seller completely neglected the garden during the few months before we moved in. We have a .14 acre lot and almost half of it is dedicated to garden space. There are several raised beds and a three foot wide section around the perimeter containing vegetation. About half of the garden contains annuals, and the other half perennials. Everything was completely overgrown when we moved in, and we didn't plan on keeping most of the existing plants, so our approach has been to just pull out everything we don't plan to regrow next year.


My main question is, what do we do with all of the plants after we have ripped them out? It sounds like we could compost, but there isn't a ton of room for a pile, and there are a ton of plants, so the pile would be huge. The other option I see is to bag up the plants and have to trash company pick them up. The problem with that is the number of bags it would require. So far I filled up about 20 bags just with the excess dill we had to remove.


For example, we have a ton of annual sunflowers. They are pretty, but there are too many of them, and we don't want to keep all of them. If I just head out there with a machete and cut all of them down, then what? If I leave them there for a while, will they eventually dry out and be able to be worked into the soil?


Long story short, we are trying to get this place ready for winter and planting things of our choosing next spring, but I am in way over my head so far.


Thanks!


Mike

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