Usually I mulch mow my leaves. This year I just left them whole. We’ll see come spring how much the anti-leaf doomsayers are correct or not. “It can kill grass!” they say. Well, I’m not trying to make my yard look like a golf course in the first place, so maybe let’s start there.
It will be interesting. I cannot envision how leaving several inches of leaves on the lawn is a good idea. Leaving a lot of property just natural though. That may make sense.
Depending on how wind interacts with the location, many leaves are likely to end up congregating at boundaries like fences or walls or around taller garden elements like herbaceous perennials, shrubs, and trees. Smaller parcels with large canopy trees may run into this problem, but the aforementioned pattern plays out in our ⅒ acre poultry yard with several large deciduous trees overhead.
I think “several inches” is a bit overwrought. It’s like one layer of leaves that will be mulched up the instant I mow next spring. And what is a “good idea”? What’s going to happen? Some grass might die. Oh noes, the world will end!
We need to rethink how we live in all respects. And not depleting lawns of nutrients that we have to replace with artificial fertilizer is part of that
You need to add that to the previous comment. You sounded like a loon who thought that leaves wouldn’t do any damage if left on top of the grass to smother them. You will lose some grass and depending on how many leaves as well the temp and amount of rainfall, you could end up with a ton of dead grass. I cleared my leaves as soon as I could after they fell.
We recently got a chip drop and cardboard/mulched the entire yard in prep for a more food and natives oriented lawn (and to kill the grass). The neighbors and family are incredulous, but the enormous earthworms we keep finding seem to enjoy it. When the leaves started falling we started mixing them with the mulch, even asked some neighbors for their bagged leaves.
I think they’ll understand better when it starts taking shape. And anyway, it’s not their lawn, who cares!
Had a bit of storm came thru that ripped the bark off of nearby trees and littered my front yard with them. The next day I enjoyed watching the birds scavenge through them for bugs and bit of nectar from the nearby dropped flowers.
It definitely can kill grass if you have enough trees and therefore leaves. I still have a few dead spots from the leaves I missed last year. I do basic maintenance and care for my yard and it’s thicker and more lush than neighbors who go full tilt. Part of that maintenance is making sure the leaves don’t kill the grass. I did one round of mowing the leaves and when I could finally get around to clearing the rest that dropped instead of mowing I blew it all into the storm ditch.
I have a major problem with the idea of bagging it up and sending it somewhere else, but, you do need to get the leaves off of any grass that you want to survive and grow. Maybe you don’t care about having grass, that’s cool but for the umpteenth time here just so I get it across, leaves can and will kill grass.
We tried this with ours and the yard looked kind of gross through the spring but it didn’t kill the grass. I had to do that myself. Now we have a nice yard of Dutch clover started with plans to over-seed it in spring again.
I’ve actually realised the same… A month ago, I’ve bought thousands of flower seeds and just seeded my whole lawn and told my housemate to stop mowing.
Front lawn is already full of small flowers (and in another month, hoping by mid summer), since I went overboard, hoping they’ve overtaken all the grass.
Also, planning to seed bomb the nature strips around me lol… Going to buy up 20 packets or more of random seeds and sprinkle them around my block
Make sure the seeds you buy are for local varieties of plants! Local grasses, flowers, trees, bushes, even so called weeds as long as they’re native to the area! Weeds aren’t real, we made it up; there is only native and invasive. All plants serve a purpose in their natural habitat!
tbh there needs to be a conversation about the honey industry.
while the food is definitely important, honey bees are not native to areas. they edge out natural pollinators solely for capitalist profit. it isn’t the most destructive habit capitalism causes but honey bees should be raised in land they are native to.
Insect population declining is a symptom, the issue is that natural ecosystems are declining.
I assure you that is you plant natural wildflowers and you stop mowing your lawn the insect population and biodiversity in your area will explode in just a few months.
So I don’t think adding more insects is the solution, if we give them the habitat the insect population can quickly grow back.
One thing to note, though, is that honey bees are likely a factor in declining native insect populations. Their ability to outcompete native species results in a direct decline in the populations and effectiveness of native pollinators in areas nearby where beekeeping is practiced.
I don’t know much about hfcs production, though, so I’ll have to look into that.
I don’t think it’s any more reasonable to expect honey bees to be restricted to their “native lands” any more than cows, or wheat. But flowers will feed whatever happens along, and wildflowers will feed what tends to live in that area.
I’m a soil scientist. I’ve never heard of this product, so I am highly sceptical. My understanding is that it’s a derivative from wood pulp, that aims to mimic humic acids.
Supposedly it can chelate (make some ions more labile and therefore prone to leaching). To me, that would seem like it would have the opposite effect of what you would want, assuming this is dispersion (and salinity) issue. Even if it is, you want to apply calcium and magnesium amendments
Why is your soil full of clay clumps? Is it compacted? Was it admixed->screened like often occurs in residential topsoils?
I’m very much a beginner to this, so I don’t understand much of what you’ve said (although I appreciate the info and will do some googling). I’m renting, the house was built about 30-40 years ago and I don’t know what was done then.
There’s one garden bed in particular that’s full of lumps of clay. The soil is otherwise not too bad to dig, but the drainage seems fairly terrible. I’ve tried sowing seeds in there and very little germinates.
When you say amendments, would that be things like lime or gypsum, or fertilisers and soil improvers, or some other option I’m too much of a noob to know about?
How big is the bed? If it’s a drainage thing, you could add a shitpile of peat or other fulffy organic matter to improve drainage. Mix it in with a rototiller really well.
If the beds are small and relatively shallow, you could dig it all up, put a layer of gravel down, and then place the soil back over top, essentially making a french drain. And excess water will slowly make its way through and into the gravel layer.
When I talk about amendments, Yes, you’re interpretation is right. I’m talking about things like gypsum, fertilizers, soil, improvers, biochar all kinds of crap like that. There’s a lot of stuff out there. Some of it snake oil some of it’s actually pretty good.
It’s pretty big, and due to budget and being carless, it will need to be dug by hand. Peat isn’t something I’ve seen where I am, are there other alternatives? Currently I’ve dug out all but the biggest plants and I’ve turned it into a compost pile (food scraps, coffee grounds, grass clippings). I figured I’d let that do It’s thing for a few months, then dig it in and add amendments. Gypsum and lime keep being mentioned, so probably those and some blood and bone or similar. I want to grow veggies and herbs there if it’s possible after all that.
I can get some products delivered from Amazon, if they sell useful amendments. Perhaps manure as well? I’ve gotten so much different advice, I feel like I’m just throwing everything at it lol. Doing something about the clay will make it infinitely easier to dig though.
Currently I’ve dug out all but the biggest plants and I’ve turned it into a compost pile (food scraps, coffee grounds, grass clippings). I figured I’d let that do It’s thing for a few months, then dig it in and add amendments
manure
That sounds pretty good, and will help. Improving organic matter content of the soil is what you want to do. Peat is good because it’s fluffy, and as result, has a lot of pore space. You could use straw, I suppose, or small sized bark chips, and thoroughly mix. Think fluffy soil.
Don’t mess with lime unless you’re sure your soil has low pH. Gypsum is good, since it’ll ad Calcium, which builds soil structure a bit, but it’s primarily used to treat saline soils.
Only one way to find out, let us know how it goes!
Honestly, it just looks like some surface punctures/abrasions that dried up, at least the ones on past peppers looked about like that. I’d check it for pests once you’re inside but it should be fine to cut around those bits and enjoy.
I’ve never seen anyone rake s forest floor and the forest seems to be just fine. Nature has been doing it’s own thing for a couple years and seemed to have figured out what works.
Us humans could learn so much about the world if we spent more time observing it in action. Instead we spent our time bending it to our will. Disrupting beautiful complexity while blissfully unaware of future consequences. Replacing nature with unadaptable machines that are high in maintenance. Machines which are prone to wearing out and breaking down. Replacing nature with our own complexity that doesn’t break down as nicely as a leaf or branch.
Nature in action is beautiful in it’s own right. No one should be judged for spending their precious time on this world observing nature. It’s a wonderfully complex and adaptive machine with many moving parts and doesn’t require any synthetic lube to run.
In the absence of humans, nature actually does kinda have its own raking mechanism: fire! By treating any fire as bad and suppressing it as much as possible, we have created a gigantic fuel load that creates much hotter, more dangerous fires when a fire does inevitably start.
The indigenous people of Australia used fire is a part of their land management. It helped clear the land and managed land between crops, regrowth and wild animal populations. Also, some seed pods require fire in order to open thier pods. Otherwise the seeds won’t be released. I had the opportunity to live in Australia for two years and got to learn about some of this.
This video nicely illustrates what has been learned about pre-colonial land management by the indigenous people.
To me, it appears they had a deep understanding of the land. Something that had been developed through careful observation and passed down through traditional knowledge. Knowledge that had been disrupted and destroyed. Leaving behind so many broken people.
It deeply saddens me to know that such intimate knowledge of the land had been destroyed. It makes me wonder just how much local knowledge has really been destroyed through colonialism or other expansive and destructive forces.
Even with all that said, we today can still learn from these people. We can still learn from the land around us. We can draw inspiration from all this in order to build a sustainable future. We can start building our own knowledge again to pass down to our future. It doesn’t have to involve raking our leaves and shipping it somewhere else that’s out or sight and out of mind.
Personally, I’d love nothing more to have a forest garden in my backyard since it’s been brought up.
Martin Crawford, Dave Jacke, and Eric Toensmeier have said that forest gardens are any garden of three or more “layers”/elements planted in such a way as to function like natural forests. It’s definitely worth pursuing in whatever scale you achieve
Just be careful not to project too much onto nature. The layman’s idea of nature is pretty heavily biased because of our assumptions (and this obviously can be very different depending on the input culture). There is a strong dualism of culture vs nature and most of our idea of nature is produced in differentiation to our culture. For example, when people see human industrial technology as evil, nature is suddenly natural, chemical-free, mother earth, in harmony, sustainable, etc. But neither technology inherently evil nor nature inherently sustainable or better. Natural systems break down all the time. I would think that for a system of limited ressources sustainability would need some sort of planning capacity?
To me, those look like bug bites. I can tell you it is not late blight. If the rest of the plant has issue, it might be alternaria canker: …ifas.ufl.edu/…/alternaria-stem-canker.html
I am not an expert. I’m surely missing other possibilities. I expect it will look good on the inside, and if so, I would eat it, but I am not known for my food safety in matters like this.
I suspect it’s going to take a lot more egg shells than that to have too many, but maybe someone else knows for a fact. Just make sure you throw them in a hot oven before you compost them. You want to hold them to at least 160F to kill salmonella. Some places recommend 250F for an hour. I generally have them around 350F for 30-40 minutes.
This accomplishes a few things:
It kills the salmonella
It makes them easier to break into small pieces
It allows them to break down and extract the minerals far more easily in the compost
With how many you’re going to be composting, you may want to find a method to really grind them finely, towards a powder. I’d imagine that will allow you to compost more, without reaching some possible negative points like too much aeration to the soil. Though you might lose some benefits, like the pest deterrence, or maybe not since some people just sprinkle egg shell powder on top of the soil and leaves. If you’re going to limit how many you compost, you might reserve some powdered egg shells for this purpose.
If you’re worried about attracting animals to your compost, rinse the shells before baking.
Almost nothing in your household consumes as much energy as an oven. Ovens consume from around 1000 (when already heated up) to 5000 Watts leading to ginormous amounts of carbon emissions on your average electricity mix. From an environmental perspective it’s completely crazy to bake your trash for 30 to 40 minutes (it’s like running your electric kettle at full power for 30 minutes straight). I’d rather not compost eggshells at all rather than baking them.
I have my oven on at least a few times a week to bake, often every day. And much of the year, it simply means my furnace will run less. OP is baking semi-commercially, they’ll have plenty of preheating time to borrow.
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