Last weekend, we took advantage of a brief interlude of nice weather in the middle of an unseasonably cold November to deal with some long-overlooked gardening chores. At the top of my list was tidying up the flowerbed in the front yard, which looked so promising last spring, but turned into a tumbledown mess by midsummer. I never did manage to get the flowers to stand upright again; some of the later fall blooms managed to grow straight up through the mass of flopped-over ones, but that just made the whole arrangement look even more disorganized. So it was almost a relief when the frosts of the past week withered all the remaining blossoms, leaving nothing but a drab, brown mass. At that point, there was no reason to leave them standing (or half-lying) any longer, and I could simply cut them down to the ground and start over in the spring. (The flowers we grew this year were all annuals; next year, the perennials in the wildflower seed mix are supposed to take over. Those may be a little less subject to floppage, but just in case, I plan to build a support grid of stakes and string, as described in this article. Watch this space next spring for details.)
The different large undertaking we had to attend to became raking leaves. We have no large wooden in our backyard, but our associates' deliver masses of leaves our manner?Sufficient to make a massive pile at the patio. The huge trouble changed into now not lots raking them as identifying what to do with them all, as our compost bin turn out to be already complete to overflowing. We ought to, of course, have really bagged them up and left them out on the lessen for the borough to select up, but that seemed like a waste of a number of quality natural material. Since our now-denuded flowerbed become going to need a nice thick layer of mulch anyway, I advised, why no longer placed those sort of excess leaves to use for that cause?
The exceptional manner to do this can were to simply rake the leaves immediately onto the flowerbed. That would possibly have helped hold the bed tidy sooner or later of the wintry climate and warmth the soil inside the spring, but it could moreover have brought about problems once the seeds started to sprout. Whole leaves likely would no longer break down very masses over the path of the wintry climate; that they'd simply clump collectively in a dense mat, which is probably difficult for the seedlings to interrupt via. So if we desired to expose those leaves into fluffy, nutritious mulch, we might want to break them up one way or the opposite.
Fortunately, we knew of an smooth manner to do that. I overlook in which I first read approximately the idea of mulching leaves along with your string trimmer, but it's easy sufficient. First, you fill a pleasing, massive bucket (we used considered considered one of our trash barrels) approximately half of complete of leaves.
Then, you stick your string trimmer in the bucket, switch it on, and swirl it spherical to cut up all of the leaves.
When you are done, you will have decreased the half of-barrel of whole leaves to a far smaller amount of coarse crumbs. You don't have to be a perfectionist about it: if a stray leaf here and there survives intact, it may not do too much harm. What you want to avoid is a strong mass of entire leaves a good way to definitely clump collectively under the snow, in region of breaking down.
It took approximately half an hour to approach greater or less half of of the leaf pile in this way, producing sufficient mulch to cowl the flowerbed more than one inches deep.
The the rest of the pile may be tended to subsequent weekend, or whenever we have a little unfastened time. Depending on how lots mulch we get, we are capable of add that to the flowerbed or use it some other place, which include our bramble patch. And if all else fails, we can just promote off it into the compost bin; the finer leaf crumbs will clear out down through the bulkier gadgets already in there, in place of piling up on pinnacle and spilling over.
Turning waste into a few aspect beneficial: what will be greater ecofrugal than that?
