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Autumn’s Carpet

   Written by on November 6, 2014 at 6:05 pm

Y’all remember Julia, my friend that had all the great ideas about what you can do with pumpkin seeds? Well, she’s come through again with a solution for what to do with all the bazillions of leaves that are raining down on us. I’ll save that for the big finish though.

a walk in the gardenThere are several ways to deal with all these leaves. The first, and probably my favorite, is nothing. If I didn’t want grass in the side yard on the north side of the house, I’d just leave the leaves alone but the trees over there drop leaves that turn into gray mush, effectively preventing anything from sprouting from under them in the spring. But if your yard is basically a woodland, perhaps all you need to do is sweep leaves from your sidewalk from time to time. The fallen leaves form a perpetual mulch, which gets better and better the longer it is left undisturbed.

If you have a real lawn, the very least you must do is run over your leaves with your mower several times to chop them up. Do this early and often during leaf season, because thick mats of leaves pulverize poorly. Thin, fast-rotting leaves such as dogwood and maple work well with this method. Thicker oak leaves require repeat passes with a mower.

Love the smell of leaf mold? In Europe, folks rake their leaves and set them aside to rot into leaf mold. You can toss them in a bin or pile them up just about anywhere. When left to rot on their own, leaf piles require two years to decompose, or sometimes three. Leaf mold is worth the wait, I’m told. It’s wonderful stuff for lightening clay soil (read almost anywhere in Charlotte County) since leaf mold particles can absorb three to five time their weight in water.

Chopped leaves (see suggestion #2) can be gathered in a bag attachment for your mower, and will provide you with lots of good mulch that you can use as a winter covering over resting vegetable or flower beds.

Compost. Lots of work. First, you need to chop the leaves and wet them down, and then there’s the matter of mixing in soil, green materials, and high-nitrogen ingredients such as manure. Once all this is done, you must chop and turn the heap from time to time, which is hard work. Compost is a wonderful way to dispose of weeds, kitchen waste, dead plants and other random stuff from the yard, but leaves actually slow down the process of composting. A few leaves added to compost are okay, but if you have a lot of leaves, leaf mold is the way to go.

Now, Julia’s solution to cleaning up leaves was to purchase a cute little sweeper-upper with a bag attachment. To operate, one simply strolls behind the wheeled contraption, resting one hand on the handle, the other waving at the neighbors. Several bright yellow brushes on the front of the thing rotate on the wheel axle and in the process give the leaves enough lift-and-toss action to propel them into the bag behind them. When the bag is full, one wheels the whole business to the edge of the woods and empties the bag there. What could be easier, I ask you?

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