So, Halloween is over, even though the candy remains and the jack-o-lanterns are beginning to slump on the porch, looking like they're nodding off while on duty. You say you were going to throw them away? Forget putting them on the curb -- jack-o-lanterns are great additions to your compost pile. The main thing to remember about composting your jack-o-lanterns is that it's best to chop them up a bit, and then cover them with a nice, thick layer of straw or leaves so that they'll break down over the winter, and also so they don't attract rodent pests to your pile. In all honesty, though, the squirrels seem to enjoy my pumpkins more before Halloween, when I want to keep them nice and free of rodent bite marks, than after. It's almost a guarantee that after October 31st, my resident squirrels have gone from craving pumpkin to jonesing for tulip bulbs. Or maybe my squirrels are just messing with me... But, I digress. My point is: compost those pumpkins! They decompose very quickly and add a bit of "green" matter to the pile during a time of year when "browns" are in abundance. Do you compost your jack-o-lanterns?

Did any of you happen to catch "The Botany of Desire" on PBS last night? I had the DVR set, and happily, the kids were (mostly) asleep so I was able to watch more than I thought I'd be able to. While I kind of zoned out during some parts of it (not much interest on my part about growing a certain weed (ahem) but still impressed at the ingenuity of the growers of said weed) I did enjoy the segments about the apple and the potato.

What I appreciated most of all, from a gardener's standpoint, is that Pollan makes a strong case that we are part of nature, not standing apart from it. That as much as we may believe we have a modicum of control over the natural world, it has just as much control over us. It's a viewpoint I've believed in since I started gardening as a teenager, and I think it's one that most die-hard gardeners have. As much as we may try to control what happens in our garden, nature will do its own thing. We can try to restrict where the Nigella grows, but it's almost a guarantee that it will pop up somewhere totally different, and usually in a spot that does more for the plant's own self-preservation than it does for the aesthetics of our garden. Such is life in the garden.

Besides the overarching theme of "plants doing what they can to survive," I was happy to see Pollan make the point again and again about the danger of monocultures. There was also quite a bit of discussion about GMOs, especially in the segment about potatoes. I was very, very happy to see that the documentary profiled an organic potato farmer who was doing everything right and succeeding amid the conventional farms he was surrounded by.

If you weren't able to watch "The Botany of Desire" last night, it will be re-broadcast several times in the upcoming week or so on most PBS stations. Check the website for information about the show, as well as the broadcast schedule.

Did you watch "The Botany of Desire?" Have you read the book? Thoughts and opinions, please!

I'm putting together my editorial calendar for November, and, rather than just writing about the topics I find interesting, I want to hear from you! There will be a few polls this week so I can gauge your interest in a variety of topics. Today, I'm wondering which vegetables you want to learn to grow organically. Please take the poll, and if I haven't included a vegetable that you're interested in, please tell me about it in the comments. I appreciate your input!

It is my favorite time of year, which may be a surprise, considering how much I love my garden. And while it's bittersweet, putting most of my garden to bed is a lovely experience when it can be done in cool, crisp weather with hundreds of flame-colored leaves drifting down around me.

There is, of course, a more practical reason for my love of fall. All of those leaves go to work in my garden, improving my soil. I have six large shade trees on my lot, and I still find myself stealing my neighbor's leaves off of the curb. It's a sickness, I tell you....

Anyway. There are five main ways I use leaves in my garden:
1. Shred them with a lawn mower (or a chipper/shredder, if you've got it) and use them to mulch garden beds after the ground freezes.

2. Shred them and dig them into your garden beds. They'll break down over the winter, and your soil will have received a nice dose of organic matter.

3. Make a lasagna bed!

4. Keep a bag or a few buckets of them, and set them aside to add to your compost pile throughout the winter. Anytime you add food scraps or other "green" stuff to the compost pile, throw some leaves in there, too.

5. Make leaf mold.

Leaves also work well in your vermicomposting bin, but don't add too many, because they can mat down and create an anaerobic environment for your worms.

Do you hoard your fall leaves? What's your favorite way to use them in the garden?

Change begins at home, and for those of us who would rather be in the garden than anywhere else, the garden is a perfect place to wage war on climate change. Here are 5 things you can do in your garden to have a positive impact on the environment:

1. Grow your own organic food. How we eat has a huge impact on the environment. The way our food is grown and transported is, generally, atrocious. We're so used to eating bland food grown in pesticide-laden fields and then shipped across the country or around the world that we've lost most of our connection to "real food." Grow a window box of mesclun, a few tomato plants in pots on your patio, or a sprawling vegetable garden. No matter what you do, it will have a positive impact on the planet.


2. Use human power whenever possible. Trade the gas mower for a reel mower and the leaf blower for a rake. You'll reduce the amount of harmful emissions generated by typical landscaping machinery and get good exercise to boot.


3. Plant a tree. Or, as my Twitter pal, landscape designer Susan Cohan, advises "plant a whole forest of them." Trees absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, shade our homes (so we use less energy cooling our homes in the summer), and provide homes for wildlife (among many other things.)


4. Compost your food, lawn, and garden waste. Many people think that it's all the same, that organic matter will break down the same whether it's in a landfill or in your compost pile. Not true -- in a landfill, because of the sheer mass and compaction of materials, organic matter breaks down anaerobically, accounting for 34% of all methane emissions produced in the U.S. every year. Compost it instead, and you'll be doing double duty by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and producing something that will improve your soil and allow you to grow healthier plants.


5. And, finally (though it's fairly obvious that I'd recommend this) garden organically. Eschew the use of synthetic herbicides and pesticides, many of which are derived from petroleum. Take the time to learn about the plants and creatures inhabiting your garden, and find Earth-friendly ways to deal with problems when they arise. The "ease" of spraying an offending weed or insect with a chemical is short-sighted and not nearly as effective as the ads would have us believe, and causes far more harm than good.

Gardeners are powerful. We can shrug our shoulders and decide that issues like climate change are beyond our control, or we can use what we have and run screaming into the fray like Mel Gibson in "Braveheart." Actions beget actions; one small change leads to more and inspires those around us. All it takes is one gardener at a time, deciding to take action and make the world a better place. Is it you?

This is my contribution to Blog Action Day 2009. Check out the Blog Action Day site for other informative posts, as well as my pal Kerry Michaels' (our About.com Container Gardening Guide) great post on the subject.

Now that the trees are starting to shed their leaves in my neighborhood, I'm just about ready to put the next phase of our garden expansion into action. Because I abhor removing sod, all of my beds now are either raised beds or lasagna gardens. Fall is the perfect time to create a lasagna bed, because there is a wealth of organic matter around at this time of year. I've been stockpiling newspaper for weeks now, and once the leaves start dropping more heavily, I'll use those, along with compost, straw, food scraps, and grass clippings, to create more space to garden.

At this point in my garden's evolution, I have all of my beds in place. The next step is to expand them. This year, I'm focusing on getting rid of more of my front lawn. I did a lot of work on it last year, and I'm loving the changes I've seen. When most people think of lasagna gardening, they naturally think of creating a brand new bed where there was nothing before. But the lasagna method is also excellent for expanding an existing bed. Yes, it will look funny at first, with the edges up to two feet taller than the original part of the bed. But by spring, it will be very close to the level of the existing part of the garden, and you can either rake the excess out to level it or topdress the older part of the bed with a couple inches of compost to bring the level up. It will all work out, and you don't have to dig out a single piece of sod to make it happen.

Eliot Coleman is one of my gardening heroes. At their farm in Maine, Coleman and his wife, garden writer Barbara Damrosch, have perfected the art of winter gardening. Coleman wrote an article recently for Mother Earth News about constructing and growing in low tunnels, and it's a must-read for anyone who's trying to grow more of their own food.

We grew a few crops in low tunnels last winter, and I am preparing the beds now for our winter garden. While Coleman's article focuses mainly on crops to plant now for spring harvest, in my garden I planted several greens that love cool weather, such as kale, spinach, and mache, and was able to harvest a little something throughout the winter. We harvested fresh, sweet carrots in March, and enjoyed the occasional salad or spinach dish during our coldest months.

I'm increasing the amount of space devoted to low tunnels this winter, in the hopes that we'll not grow enough food for salads all winter, but also be able to harvest carrots, beets, and peas. Growing food during the winter has replaced my typical winter past-time of poring over seed catalogs and cursing the weather. For the most part, anyway.

I've been saving tomato seeds since August, and now that the season is winding down, I'm trying to make sure that I haven't overlooked any of the varieties I want to save for next year. A few of the tomatoes I grew this year were disappointing, or just not very exciting, so I won't be bothering with them again. But I also grew several varieties, including 'Japanese Black Trifele,' 'Polish Linguisa,' and 'Tiger-Like,' that I definitely want to grow again. Because these are all open-pollinated heirloom varieties, I know that I can save the seeds and enjoy them again next year.

If you haven't saved tomato seeds before, you should try it. It's really a very simple process. Since I was saving seeds anyway, I took photos of each step of the process and put together a quick set of step-by-step instructions for anyone who is interested in learning how to save tomato seeds.

On a related note, I'm thinking of putting together a seed exchange here in the forum at About Organic Gardening. If there is some interest in it, I'll go ahead and set up that part of the forum. Please let me know in the comments if this is something you'd be interested in getting involved in.

We tucked a couple pumpkin seeds into the ends of the raised beds back in May, and now we've got five pumpkins coming along nicely. The squirrels tried nibbling on one of them when it was tiny, but luckily the bite marks calloused over and the pumpkin kept growing. We've been putting plastic nursery pots and other things over the pumpkins to prevent further damage, and (knock on wood) it seems to be deterring the squirrels for now. At least, for as long as the squirrels are able to steal my tomatoes and leave leftover tomato mess all over our patio furniture. I do hope they'll choose someone else's tree to nest in next year (does anyone know---they don't reuse their nests, do they? Please tell me they don't....) So, two of the pumpkins are nice and orange, and we have three small ones that I hope will be ready in time for Halloween (if not, they'll make wonderful Thanksgiving decorations!) We didn't have many issues with our pumpkin crop this year, other than the squirrels. Even powdery mildew, which was a problem on my other squashes, wasn't a big deal on the pumpkins this year. We're planning on using two of the biggest ones for jack-o-lanterns. I'm thinking that one of the smaller ones (at least) will become a jack-o-plantern (as our Container Gardening Guide, Kerry Michaels, likes to call them.) Did you grow pumpkins this year? Or gourds? Tell us about it!

It has been an annoyingly dry September here in Michigan. According to the National Weather Service, we've had a measly .42 inches of rain, when we should have gotten closer to three and one-half inches by now. Of course, this wouldn't matter as much if I weren't coddling my fall seedlings along. The spinach, turnips, beets, kale, peas, lettuces, radishes, and chard I planted in late August and early September have needed constant watering. And it's been fairly hot -- the first batch of spinach bolted almost as soon as it had germinated.

Which leads me to think about the things I can do a bit better, water-wise, in my garden. I already mulch everything in sight, so that has helped quite a bit. We have one home-made rain barrel, but when it's dry like it has been, that one barrel of water gets used up pretty quickly. We're going to make another one to put under the garage downspout. This will make watering the beds behind the garage much easier.

I'm just happy I don't worry about watering my lawn. It has started to turn a bit brownish, but it's still much greener than it was at this time last year (last August was a killer!) I don't think I've watered my lawn (other than a few areas that I overseeded) in a few years. And I can't say that I've missed it!

What do you do in your garden to conserve water? And how is your garden faring on this, the very last full day of summer for 2009?