Very simple testament to the power of mulch for your plants:
Tree on the left has no mulch under it. It even sits in a low spot in the yard where all the rain runoff travels. Tree on the right I blew all the grass clippings under with the lawnmower a couple months ago, so it has a nice, thick layer of mulch under it.
In our part of Missouri, we’ve had little to no rain for over a month and a half now. My neighbor’s oaks were showing signs of oak wilt when we moved in here a year ago, now they’re disappearing like seedlings in a rabbit’s garden buffet. Half the trees in our neighborhood are dropping leaves and going dormant. It looks like November on the ground already. The dogs send puffs of dust flying every time they run. Our water bill that normally runs $30 a month was $142 last month. I wouldn’t even want to see the neighbor up the hill- who have the only green yard in our subdivision and run their impact sprinklers at least 10 hours a day from dawn to dusk every single day.
The only real blessing is I haven’t had to listen to lawn mowers all around us every weekend… but it’s been replaced by the sound of chainsaws cutting down dying trees and clouds of dust from stump grinding. I think I preferred the lawn mowers. 😦
So anyway, moral of this story is, MULCH YOUR PLANTS. If you can’t deal with the messy way it looks, then put landscaping around them, like the plastic yard dividers, landscaping bricks, rock, etc. and put the mulch inside that contained area. But mulch your plants. It doesn’t just conserve water. It keeps the roots cooler in the heat, it protects the plant from the brutality of the sun beating down on it. It keeps the soil from compacting and allows air exchange and microorganisms to enrich your soil. It attracts earthworms and it breaks down over time, building topsoil, creating nutrients and feeding your plants. It keeps the weeds down. (Anything that cuts down on my weed eating time is a good thing!)
My neighbor hates mulch. He wrinkled his nose at me last fall when he came over and asked me if I’d like him to vacuum up all the weeds and grass clippings- and I told him, “No thanks, I’ll chop them up and use them for mulch.” I was dumping bags of them around my trees when he stopped by. His granddaughter said, “What’s mulch?” He pointed to what I was doing and said, “That.” He was absolutely disgusted. He mows and uses Round Up at the base of all his trees to make nice, neat little clean rings under them with no weeds. He wants his yard to look like a city park.
His trees are the ones being cut down now because they’re dying.
Who else is tired of reading about drama with my ex and would like me to get back to writing about important stuff about nature and yards and what I’m doing in the garden this spring?
Gods me too.
So I’m now engaged, planning a wedding and already making plans for what to do with our back patio this spring. I wasn’t prepared for living in a subdivision. My neighbors seem to hate nature. In fact, our next door neighbor came over this weekend, after watching me outside with our mulching mower for half an hour and offered to pick up our leaves with his giant leaf vacuum. He’s gone around to practically every yard in the neighborhood and picked up all their leaves and he diligently picks his up several times a week so that they do not mar his perfect landscape of Bermuda grass. The other neighbors have all fallen in line, blowing away with their blowers and burning, burning, burning. Even when there were burn bans and 20 mph winds. Can’t have those leaves lying around on our perfect grass. Not acceptable.
So like I said, our neighbor with the leaf vacuum comes over and offers to do our yard too, I’m sure he saw me FINALLY outside with my little mulching mower and wondered wtf I was doing. To him, it must have looked the equivalent of trying to vacuum an entire house with a Dust Buster. So he came over on his four wheeler with his granddaughter and offered to get rid of our leaves. I could tell by the disappointment on his face when I said, “No thanks, I’m using the leaves for mulch. My apple trees will love it,” that this was not the response he’d expected to hear at all. His granddaughter asked what mulch was. He told her, but explained mulch like it was something nasty our dogs might leave lying around the yard for us to step in.
I’m likely the pariah of the neighborhood now. I’ll be that “weird hippie that doesn’t clean up her leaves” from now until we move. I’m ok with that.
I’ve been breathing smoke from every yard around us for WEEKS. I’m allergic to it. So this means my lungs decide they don’t want to function every time one of our neighbors declares war on their yard. I can’t for the life of me understand what the purpose is of having a pristine, perfect yard that you never actually go out and spend any time in… except to do maintenance and then go back inside. These people don’t seem to enjoy their efforts at all. Tonight, NOBODY in this neighborhood is enjoying their yard. You can’t breathe for the smoke again… and not just me- it’s so thick I can hardly see the lights in my neighbor’s yard 50 feet away from the smoke hanging in the air. I thought I’d escaped this when I left the country, where all of our neighbors at the farm seemed to hate trees and burned wood year round for one reason or another.
Can you tell where my yard ends? Now I will, eventually, pick up a lot of those leaves with the mulching mower, chop them up and re-deposit them around my trees, shrubs keep some for the garden in the the spring. But I’m not in the least concerned with having a leafless, clean yard of perfect grass. So many of the yards in the subdivision are a mono-culture of Bermuda grass or something similar. It’s thick and doesn’t allow for much of anything else to grow through it. My lawn has never been this. I’ve always had a mix of clovers, several grasses and wildflowers in my yard. I love dandelions, though they tend to only grow in crappy soil, so I haven’t had them in our yard for many years. I love a yard full of clover and spring violets, henbit and nettle. It’s colorful, the bees and butterflies love it. We always had an abundance of rabbits to watch with all the clover at the farm. Lots of squirrels here, raiding the bird feeders people put out, but not much else.
And I haven’t seen a single firefly since we’ve been here. Not one.
I’ve always thought fireflies were magical. There are tourist destinations in the Carolinas where people travel across the US, just to go look at fireflies. I’ve read in their testimonials that some of them had never seen one before. Suburbia is one of the biggest threats to firefly habitat loss. Artificial lighting, while beautiful to look at, messes with their communication signals. All those manicured, leafless lawns leave them no place to lay their eggs and if they’ve already laid their eggs in the leaves… well, they are about to get swept up and burned in massive, stinking piles. Old hay fields near creeks were some of the best places to see them. I remember being enchanted by the rivers in the dark as a teenager- sneaking down to do a little fishing at night, millions of tiny, twinkling lights guiding us along the way… Pesticide use, brush hogging and burning have really cut back on their habitat. I miss the fireflies.
We have a salamander living in our water meter here. They love wet leaves, but there are none in any yard around us. No place to hide, no place to hunt for worms or insects.
This stuff, in your garden, is a wonder-maker. I added broken down leaves to every single raised bed I’ve ever built. If I could gather them from the woods and get the stuff like above that was broken down over several seasons, even better. Leaves are great mulch. They protect soil from winter rain and smother weeds in summer. As they break down, they lighten heavy soils and improve water conservation in soils that are too sandy. They offer loads of nutrients, even in store bought potting soil. Leaf mold supports predatory insects, which help control other pests in your garden while it’s growing. Leaves also serve as habitat for lizards, birds, turtles, frogs and other overwintering insects. We have a SERIOUS mosquito problem in this neighborhood in the summer, thanks to a big retaining pond a couple houses from ours. We need every bird, frog, reptile, predatory insect and bat here we can get!
The soil in our yard (And I suspect most of the neighbor’s yards as well) is so compacted from years of no leaves, thick mono-culture grass and sterile landscaping that when our area recently got a huge amount of rain in a 24 hour period, the ground wasn’t able to absorb it all. Instead, it came up in basements and flooded the drainage ditches and creeks around us. Landscaping against nature instead of with it effects everything- water absorption, plant health, animal habitat.. and makes a HUGE difference in diversity of plant and animal species which can in turn have a huge effect on certain types of insect infestations (think more mosquitos, Japanese beetles) and fungal infections (things like oak wilt, powdery mildew and blight). I have two years to make a difference here. In that two years I’ll probably drive our neighbors absolutely batshit, but maybe in the end they’ll see a difference and try some of my crazy ideas too. I hope they’ll embrace the bat houses and bird houses and maybe… just maybe a few of the leaves.
If nothing else, at least take the time to jump in those piles before they burn them off and enjoy those yards they’re out there working so hard to keep pretty. 🙂
Belle of Dirt 