Friday, December 26, 2008

Autumn Leaves


In North Texas, leaves don't begin to fall off the trees in earnest until December. My red oak tree still had nearly all its leaves when I snapped a picture on December 13. So even though it is now winter, the pragmatic environmentalist is just now having to clean up the autumn leaves from his yard.

The pragmatic environmentalist does not like dealing with the autumn leaves that fill his yard any more than the next person. The one thing he wants to avoid is and raking and bagging all the leaves. He further does not want to haul all the bags to the street for the trash pickup. It is just too much work. Its not environmentally friendly either. A neighbor used more than twenty 30 gallon plastic trash bags to hold the leaves from his yard. A trash truck then needs to burn fuel to hall these leaves away. It doesn't make use of all the good organic material in the leaves. There must be a better way to deal with these leaves.

An alternative is composting. The pragmatic environmentalist also see this as a lot of work. It still evolves a lot of raking and hauling to get the leaves to the compost bin. Then over the next months it means tending to the bin. It you want to compost your leaves I think that is great. The organic soil created will be very useful when you start your spring gardening.

What the pragmatic environmentalist did do that is just as good as composting. He mulched the leaves into the grass. All one needs to do is first rake the leaves from the edges of the yard to the middle. Then, just get out the mulching lawn mower and run it over the leaves. All the organic material in the leave is mulched into the grass and the leaves are gone. It much less work than raking and bagging leaves and much easier than composting. It also adds good organic material to the soil in the yard.