10 Tips for Using Leaves in Your Garden

What To Do With Leaves? -
10 Tips for Using Leaves in Your Garden
Have you ever wondered what to do with all the leaves in your yard?
Around here, we consider leaves to be gold, in fact not only do we celebrate when the leaves fill up our backyard, we actually go and pick up other people's leaves as well.
Today we'll be collecting leaves to use in the food forest.
It's fall in Florida, and that means leaves on the ground, which is a good thing when you're a gardener or a farmer, leaves are an amazing free resource for the food grower.
The trees are usually so tall that no one sprays them with chemicals, which means they're a pretty safe choice for the garden, the farm, or the food forest.
Here in Northeast Florida we've got leaves dropping from October to March. Our compost pile at the house was getting low, but now it's finally full of leaves again.
10 tips for collecting and using leaves in the garden
1. Protect your car
Get yourself a good piece of tarp, or simply use an old sheet to cover up the back of your car.
2. Pick up leaves before the rain hits, wet leaf bags are heavy.
3. Look for neighborhoods with big trees and nice gardens and know when they pick up yard waste.
4. Avoid gardens full of invasive plants and trees or with black walnut trees.
As an example, we once picked up a full bag of sword ferns, which are extremely invasive here in Florida. So now, we avoid gardens with visible fern leaves.
5. Inspect the leaves. When you bring the bags into your gardens make sure to go through the leaves as you dump them out to remove any trash, invasive plant material, etc.
6. Shred the leaves through a shredder, a wood chipper, or run your lawn mover over the leaves to compost them faster.
7. The bigger the pile, the faster the leaves decompose. AND
8. If you mix your leaves with greens such as garden waste or hot compost items such as chicken manure, the leaves will compost faster.
9. Save the bags. In many cases, the bags used are contractor grade trash bags, and these can easily be used for your own projects.
10. There are many great ways to use leaves:
We use leaves to:
1. To compost in one of our piles.
2. As mulch to suppress weeds around plants
3. As a natural fertilizer - while the nutrient content in leaf litter is low, it is a great added organic amendment to any garden.
4. We use leaves to make great soil combined with other garden waste.
5. To fill garden beds and areas that like to flood.
6. To fill pots
#foodforest #leaves #compost

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