January leaf gathering
If
you've got some spare energy for the garden while the ground is frozen
in January, there's one obvious solution --- harvest some biomass. With
over 50 acres of woodland circling our core homestead, there's a nearly
unlimited supply of leaves
just waiting for my rake in the winter. Add a couple of goats and a
trusty dog and a biomass-harvesting expedition turns into a winter
treat.
Back home, the question
becomes --- who could use those leaves most? Monday's harvest went into
the chicken coop, and that's definitely the spot where I recommend
utilizing high-carbon amendments first. With our deep bedding suitably
refreshed, I next turned to our hazel bushes to use up leaf bags two and
three.
The ground is too frozen
to weed before I mulch, but I still have plenty of newspaper stockpiled.
So I laid down two-sheet thicknesses then used old logs to weigh down
the edges and form a sort of moat to keep leaves from blowing around.
Finally, I filled the container up with leaves.
If we get a good soaking rain or dense snow before our next windstorm
(not a bad bet since we only see breezes down in our holler maybe once a
month), the leaves will mat down and should keep our hazel bushes well
mulched for the rest of the winter and spring. And the rotting biomass
will slowly feed the bushes too, providing low-nutrient fertilizer that
will simulate the leaf mold found in a woodland setting. Hopefully 2016
will be another good year for nuts!
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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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as of Fri aft. not sure what's up. I'll prob. return tomorrow. I'll write again on it then, too. Esp because I hope to report on Megan by tomorrow nite... sorry to be such a worry-wort!--mom