Tying things up at the end of the season

All of the annual plants are out, all the structures have been taken up.  A few days ago the remaining chores were taken care of.  At this point little remains to be done, the beds are mostly ready for winter. 

The asparagus was cut down a few days ago.

Spinach for next spring was planted in early October, two rows of Burpee's Double Choice hybrid and two rows of Viroflay.  It germinated well and is showing the first true leaves.  I'll need to thin it soon.  Before the first major cold arrives the bed will be covered with a plastic greenhouse, helping to warm the soil over the winter.

Success with spring-planted spinach has been hit or miss for me, but the overwintered spinach is pretty dependable, and early, usually mid-March.

Next year's tomato/pepper bed has a nice cover crop of field peas, oats and berseem clover growing in it.  At the rate it is growing there might be a few clippings that I can feed to the rabbits before long.

The sweet potato patch will be next year's potato patch. After the sweet potatoes were harvested I spaded over the soil, seeded it with the same cover crop mix and covered it with some half-finished compost.  The crop has germinated but is too small to see.

I was going to cut down the raspberry plants after the asparagus, but decided to wait.  They succumbed to fungal diseases and produced a small fall crop, another casualty of the wet early summer.  In the fall the vines set out new leaves to replace the leaves that had been lost, so they are still doing some photosynthesis.  I'll wait until these leaves brown then cut them down.

These are everbearing raspberries.  I originally wanted to cut the canes back about halfway to get an early summer crop next year.  Since disease has taken its toll they will be cut back to the ground and the canes burned, so there will be no berries until next fall.