Raking leaves

[Higgs Boson]

Those who don't receive Dave's Garden -- and those who do -- might laugh (through their tears) at this calculation of the weight of fallen leaves.

[songbird]

we don't have too many leaves here, but a friend brings extra bags raked up from their yard for me to use. it works out well for building up some low spots and for digging into the clay.

gives the worms something to work on or if buried deeply enough (in the heavy soil we have) it turns into a form of peat that eventually i dig up and mix throughout the garden soil.

songbird

[David E. Ross]

I have to rake the leaves off the back lawn. Otherwise, the leaves will smother the grass and leave dead patches.

I place at least 6 inches of leaves in all the beds as a mulch. When the weather turns hot and dry in the summer, this keeps the soil cool and moist.

After the beds are all mulched, I stir leaves into my compost pile. Actuall, it's not compost. It's leaf mold since there is little green matter.

Even then, I have mounds of leaves on the patio and paths, sometimes more than 2 ft high. These go every week into the green trash bin for the county's composting program.

All of the above are leaves in my back yard from the ash tree.

In front, I allow the leaves from my oak, zelkova, and liquidambar to accumulate on the lawn and in the shrub beds. The lawn is not grass; it's Persicaria, a ground cover. The leaf mulch protects the ground cover from occasional night frosts in winter. In the spring, the Persicaria grows up through the leaves.

[David Hare-Scott]

This contained some new information for me, living in a land of mainly evergreen trees I didn't imagine that there were places where leaf fall was such a big event - assuming the estimate of a depth of 3ft is correct. Avoiding the no-brainer, between burning and composting, I am lead to a couple of issues.

If you have so many deciduous trees that they produce a depth of 3 feet of leaves a season (seems doubtful but accepted for the point of discussion) then you are living in a forest. Where there are natural forests of this kind do people head out every weekend in the season to rake up the forest floor lest it look messy or kill the grass? Processing 100 tons a year (if true) is just absurd. Methinks the core of the problem is that they love their lawn and the idea of an artificial cleared park too much.

If a gardener has way too much work to do then they suffer one of two conditions: they take on too much or they suffer from terminal neatness. The author appears unfortunately to have both diseases at once.

Secondly I found the repeated detailed explanation, with formulae, tables (and a video!!!!), of how to estimate your volume of leaves amazing. Is the education system in the USA so poor that such sophisticated computations are dangerous territory for many of the population?

Tell me this was all a joke.

David

[Brooklyn1]

Probably serious, seriously stupid. I have large lawn areas with several large trees and large forest areas with lots of trees. I never ever rake leaves. The leaves in the forest are free to do their own thing. The leaves on my lawn early on mostly blow away and the few that accumulate under trees get taken care of with my last mowing, I have mulching blades. Come spring after the snow melts there are no leaves, they have all blown away and/or decayed. I've never seen leaves accumulating feet deep, more like a couple inches the most due to rain holding them plastered down, once they dry they blow away, where to, into the forest of course. In some areas leaves accumulate on the lawn at the very edge of the forest (depends on wind direction), after winter they get taken care of with the first mowing. Mulching blades are your friend, I never collect grass clippings either. The closest I come to raking leaves is very occasionally (once, maybe twice a year) I use a leaf blower on my driveway to blow spruce needles and cones back under the adjacent Norway spruce windbreak... and in spsring I use the leaf blower to blow teh accumulated with road grit from salt and sand from the foot of my blacktop driveway back into the road... I do that early, before the town sends the street sweeping machines out. I suppose if someone lives on a small surburban lot surrounded by fence leaves can accumulate, but I once lived that way and still I used a riding mower with mulching blades, within an hour there were no leaves on my quarter acre.

[Farm1]

From having lived in an area (Southern Highlands) where there were only deciduous trees where we lived (and lots of them) I'd say the claim of 3 ft of fallen leaves is a crock.

[Brooklyn1]

Then for you more than for me mulching blades are your friend.

Their properties are no different, they do exactly the same.

Here those leaves would just blow away... large bark nuggets make a much better/cleaner bedding mulch, leaves in foundation planting beds smell and attact vermin. I'm looking outside now, my lawn is all a lush green, all the leaves have recently fallen, hardly a leaf in sight. Just now took these... what should I rake:

[songbird]

David E. Ross wrote: ...

:) that last sounds very nice.

songbird