Leaves--Blessing or Curse?

Elisabeth — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:44:00 GMT

I have a medium size maple tree in front of my house. Intellectually I knew that it has no motivations, but at this time of year I can't help thinking that it has a nasty streak. Every year about now the tree drops a few brightly colored leaves--just enough to make me think it's time to rake. I rake, which makes me feel virtuous. The next morning I invariably awaken to find that the tree has dropped every single remaining leaf overnight. When I go out, I am knee deep in leaves and have to rake all over again, an activity that now takes four times as much time as the day before.

Why don't I just supress the urge to rake on the first day and wait until all the leaves come down? Because if I did, they wouldn't come down all at once. Some things are just laws of nature.

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I used to think of the fall leaves as a curse, but as I have gotten to be a wiser gardener, I have changed my mind. The following are a few things that fallen leaves can do for you:

Provide exercise: Forget about blowing away your leaves. Rake at least some of them at a brisk pace and you will get part of your daily quota of exercise while beautifying your property.
Fatten up the compost pile: If you have either a compost pile (passive or active) or a compost tumbler, fill it up with leaves, yard clippings and compostable household garbage (no protein material, bones, etc.). Leaves degrade fairly quickly and will help enrich your garden next year.
Blanket your beds: At the end of the season, I cover my flower beds with a blanket of fallen leaves. It helps insulate them for winter, and provides some amount of soil enrichment as the leaves degrade.

Good gardeners never waste resources. As you look out the window at the ocean of fallen leaves on the lawn, think of them as money in the ecological/garden bank. You will feel much better.

In Praise of Compost

Elisabeth — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:41:00 GMT

My garden produces lots of beautiful flowers, not to mention healthy trees and shrubs and a few vegetables and herbs. It also produces a bumper crop of garden waste. Spring and fall are the big seasons for waste, of course, with loads of accumulated winter debris in the spring and millions of leaves in the fall. My town doesn't have municipal composting, so anything that residents put out on the curb goes to a giant incinerator in a nearby city. It seems to me that it's in everyone's best interest to put less into the incinerator, so I do my bit by putting more into the composter.

My suburban lot doesn't have enough room for a full-fledged compost pile (or piles), so I have two tumbling composters. One looks like a big green garbage can on a bracket and the other looks a little like a black plastic version of R2D2, the Star Wars robot. Both work the same way--the organic waste goes into the top along with some extra water, then the top is closed and locked and the user turns the unit. After several months of watering and turning, the compost is ready to be spread around the garden. I have two composters, so the contents of one can be "cooking" while the other is gradually filling with yard debris and all the non-protein, organic garbage that comes out of my kitchen

This process doesn't work overnight, and it doesn't accommodate all the waste that my yard and garden produces, but it is one of the best things that I do for my home ecosystem and the larger environment. Compost makes a fine mulch or soil amendment, and it costs nothing other than a little time and effort. I used to be rather casual about turning and watering, and it took forever to get finished compost. Now I have turned over a new leaf, so to speak, and I turn and water nearly every day. I make it easy on myself by putting the kitchen scraps in a big bowl, adding an equal amount of water to the bowl, then dumping the whole thing into the composter.

There are lots of recipes for making "perfect" compost. Most involve calculating the ratio of brown to green waste materials and adding specific amounts of water. I don't have time to be that fastidious, so I trust my senses. If the mix inside the composter smells bad, then it is probably too wet and needs to dry out. If it is dried out and doing nothing, it definitely needs some additional moisture. If it smells sweet and earthy, it is just right and probably ready for use.

Life is hard. Composting is easy.

Growing Wise : composting

Leaves--Blessing or Curse?

In Praise of Compost