Streamlining leaf mulching
This week's theme has been biomass
transport. Mark, the innovator, tripled our leaf productivity by
changing our collection method. I had been raking up leaves that
fell on the driveway, stuffing them into our leaf
bag, and driving back to the garden to spread them one bag at a
time. Mark figured out that we could put two to three leaf bags'
worth of leaves into the heavy hauler with some judicious smooshing and
a tarp tucked on top.
He also figured out that we could rake the leaves down off the hillside
above the driveway and get scads of leaf matter for very little
effort. There's a chance the bared soil will erode some, but I
have to weigh a little bit of erosion that will never reach the creek
against extra transportation (aka, coal burned in the nearby power
plant to pollute our air and water). Some days, it feels hard to
be human --- no matter what we do, it causes harm somewhere.
The good thing about the hillside leaves is that we get some duff with
them, which helps solve our
nitrogen problem. Meanwhile, Mark has started peeing on some
of our leaves to give them an influx of nitrogen and help them
decompose faster. Suddenly, the garden feels under control!
We topped all of the beds in the mule garden this week, which means we
only have about two to three times that much garden left to put to bed
for the winter.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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"... no matter what we do, it causes harm somewhere." Actually you are very good caretakers of the land and seem to be working to leave it in better shape than when you found it. Other humans, Joel Salatin comes to mind, are also working to leave this beautiful gift we've borrowed from our children's children in better shape as well. The wonderful thing about photosynthesis is that it seems to defy the First Law of Thermodynamics. A good gardener can help the plants heal the soil and add more energy and matter to them by taking advantage of this. A plant, especially - but not only - legumes, will return more to the soil than it took out if you let it. Isn't that amazing? Isn't it amazing that you can get food from the ground and the earth ends up better off at the end of the day than when you started?
Of course, none of that would apply if you were stripping the soil of it's nutrients and not returning them, or applying chemical fertilizers and pesticides and killing off every living thing besides your "round-up-ready" corn and soybean.