How do you deal with all the leaves that just fall in your yard? Around here, the city will come to your home and vacuum them all up and drive them to a field that gets a healthy layer of composting leaves over the winter.
But one of our colleagues lives in a town where the city doesn't do any pick up. So, we take their leaves and will compost them for them.
I'll run them through my Toro blower/vac that shreds them into smaller pieces (running them through twice breaks them into small enough bits to quickly be decomposed. Sunday, I picked up about 20 garbage bags of leaves. Some of the shredded leaves will go directly in the garden beds, others will be composted. I may also use some as mulch in a couple spots.
How do you deal with your leaves?
Showing posts with label fall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fall. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Second Plantings
Weather was super great this weekend, so we spent some time in the garden, cleaning up a few beds and replanting some garlic in one. Garlic has a two-season cycle, so these should be ready to pick and eat next fall. They will hopefully sprout this fall, die back over the winter, and then come back in the spring.
Garlic is about as easy to grow as can be: Take the individual cloves, stick them in the ground about an inch deep. Cover with soil. Stand back. Wait. Water, Etc.
We also got some bare lawn patches over-seeded. We've had some trouble-spots on the terraces where the sprinklers have a hard time reaching and in one area, we've had a snow plow or school bus go over the curve and really make a mess of things. But this is a great time to sow grass: Temperatures are lower than in mid-summer, but the soil is still nice and warm. And usually there's dew at night to keep the seeds moist until they can sprout. You can usually count on some rain as well. Even so, we'll keep the sprinklers going on the area as long as possible.
Over Labor Day weekend, we planted some more lettuce. You can plant lettuce every 2 weeks over the summer and then have a continuous supply. We had started some lettuce indoors over the winter that was planted out in the spring and produced nicely - 5 or 6 heads, but we hadn't doen any successive plantings, so we've had to buy lettuce. This late planting is a bit of a long shot - will we get enough to harvest before the frost kills it all?
Another long shot was sowing some buckwheat in a couple harvested beds as green manure. They really should have been sown in July according to package directions. Next year we'll have to research a little more to find a more suitable winter cover that will be able to sprout if sown in September.
Garlic is about as easy to grow as can be: Take the individual cloves, stick them in the ground about an inch deep. Cover with soil. Stand back. Wait. Water, Etc.
We also got some bare lawn patches over-seeded. We've had some trouble-spots on the terraces where the sprinklers have a hard time reaching and in one area, we've had a snow plow or school bus go over the curve and really make a mess of things. But this is a great time to sow grass: Temperatures are lower than in mid-summer, but the soil is still nice and warm. And usually there's dew at night to keep the seeds moist until they can sprout. You can usually count on some rain as well. Even so, we'll keep the sprinklers going on the area as long as possible.
Over Labor Day weekend, we planted some more lettuce. You can plant lettuce every 2 weeks over the summer and then have a continuous supply. We had started some lettuce indoors over the winter that was planted out in the spring and produced nicely - 5 or 6 heads, but we hadn't doen any successive plantings, so we've had to buy lettuce. This late planting is a bit of a long shot - will we get enough to harvest before the frost kills it all?
Another long shot was sowing some buckwheat in a couple harvested beds as green manure. They really should have been sown in July according to package directions. Next year we'll have to research a little more to find a more suitable winter cover that will be able to sprout if sown in September.
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