Rerun post. To mulch, or not to mulch, that is the question.

 

This is a rerun of a post I did last November 22nd. Since I have many new readers, I wanted to share my thoughts on this topic, again, and with my new friends on Google+. I was outside today, mulching and cutting and the smells of autumn clicked and brought me back. I laid down in the yard after finishing and watched over 30 birds descend on the bird feeder. I'm not the only one getting ready for winter.

November, 22, 2012.
Every year I see hundreds, no thousands of people raking, bagging, blowing huge piles of leaves frustratingly with a small electric blower, filling huge tarps with leaves, only to put them in bags, ready to go to the landfill. Really?

The plastic bags alone will not decompose for 1000 years. You use paper bags? Really? I'm not going down that path. There are a few ways you can save the planet and still have a nice yard, in fact a better yard, and I will try to share my thoughts on the matter.

First, you don't have to have that yard that looks like you have a full time staff of groundskeepers. I tried that a few years ago. I would get angry when leaves fell on my newly raked yard, curse when the neighbors (who never seems to clean his yard) leaves would blow into my nice clean yard. Clean? Yes. Spotless? No. Ain't gonna happen Mr. Gates.

What are leaves anyway? I see free fertilizer! So I compost just about all of my leaves. In the first part of the season as the leaves are falling as they are now(see pic above), I lower my mower deck, and mulch the hell out of them. Most of the time you can't even tell there were leaves on the lawn. The only thing that throws the mulching mower for a loop are pine needles, but it still cuts them up and eventually they will break down faster this way.

Why not leave them there and do nothing? Well, for one thing it looks like no one lives there. If you leave the leaves and debris on the ground, they get wet, mat up and cut off water, air and sunlight to the ground. They will eventually break down, sure, but it will take a long time, and everything under them will die. When you mulch, you are increasing the surface area of the leaf exponentially therefore giving more area for air and water and bugs and whatnot to break it down. It also reduces the "pile" by 2/3's. See pic below.

After most of the leaves have fallen, and most of my neighbors have joined my collection, I will start to clean out the beds. I do blow these out, into the yard, where I mulch them there. Some are blown down to the back of the yard where they will join the compost pile. The yard loves it and I save on chemicals, time, energy etc.