the NEGG

Composting your yard waste is a great way ensure you are not needlessly filling up landfills. The problem with putting leaves in a plastic bag is that the since the plastic bag does not decompose, the leaves inside cannot decompose.

The simplest method is to just use the mulch function (no bag) on your lawn mower. The grass clippings will provide a great free fertilizer for your lawn. What could possibly be simpler than doing nothing extra at all? However, if the going gets tough, you will have to use the bag. Rather than filling up a giant lawn bag half-way (or half empty), dump and spread the clippings over your flower bed to prevent weeds from growing around your plants. If there are toxic fertilizers present on the grass, I wouldn’t sprinkle this around the edible plants in your garden.

Of course, if your town picks up your yard waste to be brought to a composting facility, then you should do so. But, if you have room and feel ambitions, you can make your own compost pile of yard waste. Dig a large shallow hole and fill it with some leaves. Lightly cover it with dirt and place some more leaves over that, and sprinkle that with some more dirt. You will be amazed at how many leaves you can fit into such a small hole. If you followed my recommendation of waiting to rake up the leaves, then they should be that much lighter and crumbled. Be sure to mix up the pile every other week or so to ensure there is plenty of oxygen to take place. A year or more later, you should have the finest top soil money can buy.

If you don’t have enough room in your yard (or don’t want to look at the pile of rotting leaves soon to be beautiful, nutrient rich potting soil) but you are uneasy about the fact that you are preventing purely organic matter from returning to the earth, I suppose you could purchase the biodegradable bags instead.

As ridiculous as this may sound, I am totally serious. Wait to rake your lawn. I’ll start with this question: Who rakes the forest? I don’t see the squirrels running around with rakes or the bears going to the gas station to fill up their leaf blowers, or perhaps they hire landscapers. If leaves really needed to be raked, then the forest would fill up. My point is that when leaves just fall off the tree they still have some moisture content in them. But if you wait a few weeks, or till the end of the season when all of the leaves have fallen, the leaves will be dried out and much lighter.  They will practically crumble on your hands when you place them into the non-biodegradable plastic bag and take up less space so you can use much less bags.

If you have a fenced in yard, mother nature will do most of the leaf pushing around and conveniently push all the leaves into a pile along your fence. I can faithfully say that this will be my fourth season that I have not raked may back yard. However, I would not recommend letting the leaves sit around in the front yard if they will cause a hazard to cars and people.

One thing that people tell me is that they would not dream of doing this because it will kill the grass if the leaves cover it up and sit there too long. They will also point out since all those leaves covers the forest floor, no grass can grow. My argument to that is that since I have left the leaves there until the end of winter, my grass did not die. If that was the case, snow would kill all of the grass since that can sit there for weeks. Leaves are not nearly as heavy as that elephant shaped kiddie pool that sits in your backyard all summer. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the light coating of leaves acts as a nice blanket to keep that ballpark quality grass warm and toasty all winter long. Grass doesn’t grow in forests because light cannot penetrate through the canopy of leaves. Oh and my final point is: Why not just leave the leaves there and give yourself some color throughout the long, cold, gray winters. When it starts getting warm again, rake the leaves.

I don’t have the exact math of exactly how much time (and money!) this will save you but let’s try to figure this out. Up until 4 years ago, I would rake the lawn every Saturday with my father throughout fall. I think we would rake up 8 – 12 (10 on average) bags every week and spend about 4 hours doing so.  Let’s also say that we did this for 10 weeks until all of the leaves are all gone.

TIME SAVED: 80 hours per season, per person. You just gained two extra work weeks but doing absolutely nothing.

MONEY SAVED: $17 + tax. I figured 10 bags /week x 10 weeks = 100 bags. And a package of 100 bags is about $17 + tax.