Rake, don't blow!
It's the time of year (in the northern hemisphere) when trees lose their leaves, and people have to figure out what to do with all that crunchy brown biomass!A couple of ideas:
- keep in mind that using a gasoline-powered leaf blower for one hour releases as much air pollution (and CO2) as driving a car for 100 miles. (Source: American Lung Association) If you have to use a leaf blower, choose an electric one. Even better though is to pull out the rake, and rake away! If done correctly, the raking shouldn't leave you with a sore back, but will be a good cardio workout (and, let's face it, we could all use a bit more exercise!).
- composting at home will save all of the energy costs to collect and transport the leaves to a (sometimes) distant commercial composting facility.
Note: We compost some of the leaves that fall, and leave many of them in the garden beds to decompose, but for a yard our size, we have too many leaves to manage all of them on-site, so we do a lot of bagging, or at the height of leaf-raking season, in our community, people can rake their leaves to the curb and a big vacuum comes along to suck up the piles of leaves.
Composting is actually one of the easiest and most gratifying things a person can do in their garden! In its simplest form, composting means putting the yard waste into a pile, and leaving it long enough so that it decomposes.
I found a nice explanation of composting do's & don't's at a website called compostguide.com.
For those who are energetic, they can stir the pile, and work to have a good mix of green and brown items (short-hand for wet & dry).
For those who do not have a lot of space, there are self-contained compost bins available - there is often a lid on the top, and a portal at the bottom. Garden and kitchen waste goes in the top, and eventually is removed from the bottom as compost. Or, sometimes they are set up as a tumbler because mixing the compost materials will help them break down faster.A pile that is about as tall as it is wide - 3 feet by 3 feet - seems manageable. The pile will "shrink" as materials decompose into a rich humus material, so there is soon more room on the pile for more yard waste. In general, large materials take longer to break down than smaller materials, and woody items will take a very long time to decompose.
Kitchen scraps do great in the compost pile - even egg shells, corn cobs, and watermelon rinds. The only things to avoid are animal and dairy products.
One composting no-no I can pass along from years of just throwing stuff onto the compost pile is that you never want to put too much grass clippings on the pile without mixing them in. They do not decompose very well, and instead end up creating a thick, slimy, smelly layer in the pile.
It can take 3 to 12 months for a compost pile to yield humus. When you want to check, just dig some material out from the bottom of the pile - if it looks like rich soil, it's ready. If it still have lots of plant materials visible, it needs to "cook" a bit longer.Use the humus as a soil amendment. Mix it into your vegetable and flower beds. The humus is nutrient rich and full of organic material that helps the soil to retain moisture. There is more information available through the EPA website.
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