Netting Leaves
In
one of my all-time favorite books --- Taran Wanderer --- our hero
stumbles upon a family which provides for its members by stringing up a
big net across a river and then collecting whatever the river provides
every day. The image really struck my fancy when I first read the
book in middle school, and now as the leaves begin to catch in clotted
masses along the edges of the ford I'm inspired to try my hand at the
same thing.
Last night, I captured
enough leaves by hand to fill five 5-gallon buckets, then spread them
across the tops of my empty garden beds. Last year, I covered a
few beds in this manner and they produced the richest soil which
resulted in beautiful onions. I only covered a few beds, though,
because I had to carry the wet leaves by hand a quarter of a mile from
the ford to the house. This year I resolved to collect
more. So after I scooped up the leaves which were already stuck
to the ford, I strung up an old seine we had in the barn and left it
overnight to steep in creek water.
When
I went back to check on my net this afternoon, it was bulging with
its heavy load of leaves. A tiny watersnake was resting in one of
the net's folds, but I wasn't fast enough to catch it on film.
Once the snake safely slipped away into the center hole of an old
cinderblock, I gathered the seine closed and lifted it into the golf
cart, then zipped home to spread the leaves on my garden. A few crawdads
crawled out of the mulch and I fed them to our ever-appreciative
chickens.
I really wanted to include a quote from Taran Wanderer here, but
unfortunately I read the first part of the series to Mark's cousin when
she was in grade school and she liked it so much that she stole the
whole compilation from me. So you'll just have to go look up the
book for yourself.... And, if you'd rather read facts about using
leaves as mulch, check out You Bet Your
Garden's page on the subject.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
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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I was wondering if you had any advice for using decomposing leaves from my creek bed in my big old compost pile. I've got a ton of heavily decomposed organic material in my creek which I plan to pull out. is this stuff good for compost? It's the dark brown, black sort, with decomposed leaves and muck.
Thanks!