Recycling Nature, How We Spent Our Weekend

   It's that time of year, leaves are piling up everywhere, lawns, driveways, sidewalks. What's a gardener to do? They all won't fit in the compost tumbler, and you certainly don't want to bag them and toss them in the landfill. (Shame on you if you do!) Have you ever noticed the best soil is in a forest? Why? Because the leaves fall and that's where they stay until they decompose. I've been studying and thinking all summer long about what I can do with the leaves, and at the same time reading a lot (mostly on all of your blogs) about the benefits of reducing or eliminating lawns. And so it began.
   This weekend Jeff and I took advantage of the idyllic weather and raked up all the leaves and pine needles that had fallen already and began distributing them. We have grandiose visions of planting up the entire back yard but there's way too much turf to dig up and we'd like it to evolve over time. Smothering the grass as we go seems like the best option, and that's where the leaves come in. We're starting under the oak tree along the fence, where the grass is sparse anyway. What better to mulch under an oak with than oak leaves!

We started with the leaves on the ground nearby...

Then added some we raked up from the lower end of the yard...

And this morning I covered the area with netting and added some logs to hold it down and define the area.

   Project Grass-B-Gone has begun. There is/was grass growing right up to the base of the trunk, but I neglected to get a real "before" picture. As more leaves fall we will rake them into the pile and extend the logs out.
   The logs themselves are another recycling item. Every time a limb falls from a tree or if a tree is blown over, we use the wood for something. The bigger pieces I use for edging the boundary between planting beds and lawn. The smaller pieces get tossed onto a brush pile out under our bird feeding area. Brush piles are much appreciated by small critters like birds and chipmunks as a safe scurry spot, and as a great place to hunt for insects.

The beginnings of my brush pile, I've already seen a chipmunk checking it out

An exquisite piece of yard art, it's hollow all the way through, a perfect scurry spot

   One more thing you can recycle is bark, especially if you can get it in big chunks. What can you use it for, you ask? How about using it to hide ugly well heads. There's a dead tree over at dean whose bark is falling off in big strips, so Jeff brought some home and placed it around the well to disguise it. The well is right in the middle of our berry garden and we can't plant anything right up next to it in case it ever needs to be accessed. I think it looks better now, needs some more bark though, we want it to look like an old tree stump.

Before

After

   Eventually we'd like to fill in this area with Winterberry Hollies, Viburnums, and maybe Virginia Creeper on the fence. All berry producers for our living birdfeeder section. Right now all we have is a Crabapple and a few Blueberry bushes, just enough to keep our resident Mockingbird occupied.