Lawn care - Don't rake your leaves?

This article or another just like it provoked quite a bit of comment in the gardening blogging community recently. The idea is ecologically sound; leaves represent biomass and resources trees removed from the soil, so don't remove them, mulch them to retrieve the nutrients.  So far so good, but if TPP followed this advice for just two years he would have a young forest. If you only have one or two trees and a whole big lawn, well OK, mulch away. Do remember that if too much organic material accumulates grasses get shallow rooted and become easily damaged. Your lawn will be more easily damaged. The organic material may attract more root feeding grubs. Our 1.3 acres has about a dozen very large trees and the leaf accumulation is significant and heavy enough to quite bury lawn even if the leaves are mulched with a lawn mower.  In places leaf accumulation can reach 12", and when TPP tried mulching and bagging them he had to stop every few feet to empty the bag. Our city does pick up leaves and mulch them enmass allowing people to pick up organic mulch to return to  gardens for free so they are not going to a landfill (one argument used by don't rakers). Some local farmers also take the leaves for their soil improvement.  Our personal leaves are moved to more heavily wooded areas or mulched and used in garden beds.  Even here the battle with woody weeds is unrelenting, and if the seedlings are not removed annually, well, a dense thicket of saplings will quickly appear.  In particular the do-not-rake-leaves advice is suspect especially if you have sugar maples. Because they make both sun and shade leaves, their crowns are dense (they can intersect up to 95% of the incoming light that hits their crown).  Growing grass under these trees is nearly impossible, although ferns and low-light ground covers work fine, and they can often handle a considerable mulch of leaves. But again the point is, you don't have lawn by the ordinary definition. Such a mass of leaves landing in our pond would begin turning it into a bog, and netting the pond and leaf removal is a bit of a problem that must be dealt with to have a big water feature. So do give this advice some thought before yelling yahoo and selling your rake. It doesn't work everywhere or for everybody.

Garden spruce up & rain paradox

Our garden/yard spruce up is going well and things are looking pretty nice.  A new patio area and a flagstone pathway were finished up on Monday and look very nice.  Mrs. Phactor's perennial flower garden looks pretty good thanks to lilies, penstemons, and delphiniums along with a few other plants, but since over 225 different plants have already flowered in our gardens this year, flowering diversity by the official beginning of summer is on the downhill slide.  Unfortunately, while it's been good weather for doing garden maintenance, some rain would be nice.  That's the paradox, you need both the good weather and the rain, but you can't have both, and you don't get to choose.  Of course, some of our new plantings don't need so much watering. With a yard full of blue violets, who would have guessed that bun-buns liked a nice foliage leaf violet?  Duh!  They looked wonderful for a whole afternoon.  So a bit of watering will be added to the day's to-do list.  Lastly TPP is feeling pretty good.  About 25 cubic yards of mulch was spread and his back did not move an once of it.  What a relief! That much mulch is not an annual or even biennial event, but an area of garden under development needed mulching so what's a few more yards?  Oh, a thinner wallet, but a healtheir back.

Kitchen Garden Update

After 3 weeks of neglect, although a good neighbor did water once or twice, the kitchen garden has survived a hot, dry July and early August fairly well and this may be attributed to the paper and straw mulch. The plants look pretty good, especially the tomatoes, however most of the near ripe fruit is on the ground half eaten. This would suggest we have a free-loading possum or raccoon hanging around. Damn. Fortunately the golden cherry tomatoes are far enough up on a tall vine (indeterminate plant you know) so they are generally out of reach. For some reason the zucchini have been slow to grow so many are in still in a juvenile mostly male stage, but are showing signs of kicking into gear. Asian varieties of eggplant are doing pretty well except the flea beetles have really laced the leaves. Peppers haven't done much yet, but a couple of plants are keeping things from being a complete failure. If the weather breaks a bit, and some rain appears, some beans, snap peas, and salad greens will be planted for fall crops. Basil and parsley have grown well, and were generously used in a Thai salad for din-dins tonight. Cucumbers have been very successful so far having climbed to about 8 feet and seem in pretty good shape. Hope the beetles hold off for a bit and don't infect them with wilt. Notice that nothing was said about vegetable because most of the summer crops are fruits. So that's the way it is for us small time farmers. Maybe the season of tomatoes and zucchini will happen yet.