Fun Yard Work, And A Little Nature Philosophy

As much as I regret the coming of Winter, and the end of the growing season, there is one activity I positively enjoy.  I refer to taking care of the leaves that fall on the lawn.  I have a heavily treed yard.  There are huge oaks, tulip poplars, sweet gums, and maples on half the back yard.  They are mostly upwind of the back and front.  So the grass gets carpeted fully every Fall.

I don't mean that I enjoy raking leaves.  I do that only to the extent required to get them out of corners and off the decks into the yard itself.

Then I mow!!!  I love shredding the leaves into small bits that nestle in between the grass leaves and decompose to improve the lawn soil.  I used to use a standard push mower, now I have a riding mower, which is easier to use.  I just keep driving back and forth over the leaves shredding them more and more each time.  With a little practice, you can keep the flung bits in rows for efficient remowing and re-re-mowing.  After a few repeated patterns, the leaves are "gone", the grass seems clean, and the lawn has effectively been mulched.

When I chose this lot 25 years ago, I tested the soil in the areas that would become lawn.  Its easy,  You take a 6" soil plug, put it in a large clear jug, fill it half up with water and then shake the hell out of it.  The gravel and mineral grit settles out first, the sand 2nd, the clay next, then the humus/loam, and finally fine silt.  After several days, you can read the composition of the soil in the layers that form.  The lot I chose had great trees, was large, and had great soil.

So imagine my shock when the house was built and I discovered the builder had cleared off the top foot of soil.  I was left with gravel, sand, and clay.  So, over the years, I kept shredding the leaves onto the top.  Today, I have 6" of loamy soil mixed with some clay.  A lot better than I started with (after the builder scraped the good soil off).

The trees don't suffer.  They depend on their fallen leaves decomposing around them to be taken up again in Spring.  But tree leaves tend to blow away.  So shredding them on the spot saves the nutrients from the leaves for the trees.  The lawn soil gets a little softer each year so that the rain soaks in better, and more air reaches the tree roots.  Tree roots actually need air.

The grass benefits too.  Aside from leaving the grass clippings on the lawn (there is no better grass fertilizer than grass clippings), the shredded leaves provide more.  That passes through the grass and eventually goes deeper into the tree root zone.  And, BTW, grass clippings do not cause thatch; spreading grass roots at the surface cause thatch.  That's why I have a fescue lawn.  Fescue does not spread by root runners.  And even grasses that spread by root runners don't cause thatch unless they are watered shallowly so that the roots all stay on the surface.  If you have thatch, you are watering too little, too often.

So yesterday was my big leaf-shredding day.  My neighbors sometimes look at me like I'm crazy, driving all around the yard with the riding mower in weird patterns.  I'm mowing leaves, not grass, so I go where the leaves are.  They rake up their leaves carefully and put them in bags to be hauled away.  Then they buy synthetic fertilizers several times a year to feed their lawns (with stuff that provides only the major 3 nutrients and none of the minor ones (like us eating meat and no vegetables).

There is also an aesthetic pleasure to the process.  It is amazing to watch the shredded and re-shredded leaves "disappear" into the lawn...

It's not perfect; I'm burning gasoline to do it.  But nothing is perfect.  If I did it as perfectly as I could locally, I would use a non-motor reel-type push mower.  But those are lousy at dealing with large leaves.  I used one at a Grandfathers place and it just bulldozed the leaves into piles in front of it.  I had to rake them up and (guess what?) they got bagged and hauled away.

So I enjoyed the grand once-a year leaf shredding.