Clean up your leaves for trick-or-treat
Happy Halloween! This is my all-time favorite childhood holiday, because (unlike those other times of the year, when you only got presents from family and close friends) you got to go out and extort gifts from every house you could reach in a two-hour stretch!
And because this exciting event falls on a Saturday this year, many of us will have the day off, and be able to prepare our walkways for the little ghosts, goblins and Donald Trumps by raking or sweeping away the latest run of those oh-so-slippery fall leaves.
But don’t dare throw away what you clean up — those leaves are your Halloween treat.
Even if all you do is rake them into a big pile, they’ll slowly decompose into compost — the perfect food for all your plants. And you don’t need to add anything to those leaves, because, as we should all know by now, compost happens.
Now falling: Free mulch! Free fertilizer!
All of those fall leaves dropping at your feet are not an annoyance; they’re an opportunity to collect all of the high-quality whole food and mulch your garden and landscape will need next season.
- If the leaves are on your lawn, just mow them right back into the turf with a sharp blade. They’ll feed the grass and break down any areas of thatch. Don’t leave any whole leaves on the lawn: They’ll smother the grass.
- You can also use a bagging mower to collect and shred leaves for mulch and compost-making, but don’t do this on the actual lawn if your turf has been treated with herbicides. Any clippings that make their way into the mix would contaminate your compost.
- Using a machine to blow leaves off your walkways makes about as much sense as taking pork chops to a Seder — you make a whole lot of noise, blow a lot of junk into the air and the leaves are still on the ground when you’re done! Instead, use the vacuum attachments that come with most electric blowers. The leaves will actually get picked up and be shredded perfectly for use as mulch or compost making on their way into the collection bag.
- Whatever you do, don’t burn your leaves! Your nostalgia for a childhood smell that reminds you of fall can send your neighbors with asthma and other respiratory ills straight to the emergency room. And it can force the rest of us to slam our windows shut on what was otherwise a nice day. Instead, offer your leaves to a neighbor who gardens. We never have enough.
Please don’t feed the trees
Randy in Kensington writes: “I had an arborist come over to give me an estimate on some trimming I can’t do myself, and he also recommended a course of fertilizing for my trees. I have a white oak, a dogwood, an ash, and a couple of red oaks and hickories — all mature and huge. He wants $500 for the fertilizing. I trust this arborist and his work, but $500 would take a good size bite out of my tree-care budget. Can you recommend a DIY alternative, so I can put more money into other tree maintenance?”
Absolutely, Randy. Instead of DIY, how about DNY — “N” for nothing. How does doing nothing sound? Mature trees are great at taking care of themselves. They don’t need us to feed them — especially with salty chemicals. The only thing they really need from us is to not pile mulch up against their trunks or let ivy crawl up and attack them.
… And don’t prune them trees until winter
When we emailed Randy back to assure him that mature trees do not need fertilizer, we added that we hoped the proposed tree trimming wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, as fall pruning can dramatically weaken plants that are now trying to go dormant.
Randy’s excellent reply? “Perish the thought! I am a faithful disciple of your organic advice and the pruning will not take place until well into December. No mulch mounds on the trees either.”
To which we can only say, “Thanks for listening!”
“Green Manure” is much nicer than it sounds
(Well it would kind of have to be, now wouldn’t it?)
Anyway, Claude in D.C. writes that he became intrigued by the concept of “green manure” and sowed buckwheat and cowpeas in his garden in late summer. He writes: “What now? Some articles recommend tilling the plants in before the ground freezes. Others recommend cutting them down and letting them compost in place over the winter, and others say to cut the plants down, cover them with black plastic, and till the composted plants in next spring.”
That’s a troika of remarkably bad advice, Claude.
Another name for your green manure (referring to the use of plants instead of poop to feed) is cover cropping (covering the soil with crops to protect it). There are many ways to do this, and a wide variety of plants that can be used. Some cover crops are perennials that must be tilled back into the soil at some point to stop their growth; while others “winter kill.”
The “cover crops” you planted are of the latter variety. They will die shortly after frost, but their roots will remain in place to hold and protect your soil over winter. Some farmers or gardeners would then till the dead plants back into the soil in the spring, but tilling brings lots of old weed seeds to the surface and releases lots of your existing soil’s nutrients into the air.
The smartest answer is to adopt the increasingly popular “no-till” approach and use your plants as what I like to call a “living dead mulch.” If the dead plants are still tall in the spring, mow the area high to leave about four inches standing. Then just dig or punch holes into what’s left and plant your summer crops right into that formerly-green mass.
Your winter-killed cover crop will act as a natural weed-preventing mulch mat, and then slowly break down to make room for another cover crop late next summer.
