Ideally if your compost can be in the highest part of your yard or downslope from your trees thats really good as a lot of nutrients and life can spread to your yard that way. Also if table scraps are an issue burying them in your garden beds or empty containers is a great option. For me i have to build a true fence to keep my dogs out of my compost but allow the cats and snakes in. I think oak leaves under and then pine leaves on top makes a excellent mulch for my flower areas. I have excess pine needles and while i like them i donāt enjoy how deep they make it into my feet.
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It may be white pine? Iām not sure? It grows in northern MI, and the needles are soft, no gloves needed. A really cool orange color too. These feel nice to walk on!
Yeah I grow in two places and one has little pressure, and ideal as can be for here. The other is a place if you enjoy failing at gardening youāll love growing here as it has every kind of pressure out there. Exhausting! Almost everything takes extreme effort to grow.
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Here blue spruce seems to have the softest needles, we are mainly Spruce, Bristlecone, Ponderosa and high enough lodgepole pine all the pretty rough kind but still makes a excellent air / sun barrier.
You definitely live in a special place as far as climate goes i think the cost for most people that live somewhere that has such a historically favorable climate for growing food / fruit gets all the imported diseases that come with it in spades. While our unpredictable freeze / thaw cycles mess up fruit trees they mess up pest insects (and predators) as well.
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the blue spruces planted around here have the most prickly needles compared to our white/ red pines and spruces. i used to work on a x mas tree farm and dreaded bailing blue spruce and scotch pines. would tear up my forearms!
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I shred and put some of my leaves in my veggie beds. This is how it looks now:
I have silver maple that breaks down easily. Neighbor has oak and it doesnāt break down as fast even after shredding.
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GREAT TED talk on leaf mulching: What do u all think?
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I think itās a good video. Iām not sure heās right about kitchen waste not composting, but heās the expert and Iām not. As to worm castings, I think heās right about that.
But if you canāt set up a worm bin you can just bury your scraps until the ground freezes. Everything except orange peels and such will be gone pretty quickly, surely by spring.
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Good video. I used a vac for awhile but I prefer my leaves not to be so small. After a year or two of adding smaller chips I want a longer lasting cover rather than a quick breakdown. Now I mostly round the leaves with a mower which does chop them some. If they would stay in place through winds I would mostly use them uncut.
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It looks to me like an opinion piece. He doesnāt seem to have research to back up his statements.
Gardening is local and even personal. We all have different situations. I collect all the leaves I can, primarily maple and sweetgum. Sometimes I also collect pine needles. My main use of leaves is as mulch.
Each fall, I spread leaves about a foot thick, area about 5 feet x 5 feet, around each of my fruit trees. I donāt shred them but the process of collecting, transporting, and spreading does crunch them up a bit. I want weed control, maintaining ground moisture and some soil enrichment there.
By the following fall, they are almost all decomposed. They did their job, and I repeat again. For me, shredded leaves would degrade too fast. I think there is soil life helping degrade the leaves, including earthworms, bacteria, and fungi.
Sometimes if I have extra leaves, I spread them a foot thick over my vegetable garden. In the Spring, they are about half degraded and I spade them in. In a month or two, they have completely disappeared. There, my goal is organic matter and soil life, easier cultivation, and water handling properties of the soil. A tiller would probably clog up with leaves but I use a spade.
As for kitchen scraps, we generally use a tumbler composter. The scraps do compost in that. I also have a stationary composter, and alternate yard waste with kitchen scraps. They compost fine in that. I donāt have visible kitchen scraps at the end, except avocado seeds.
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I can get all the enjoyment without the work of collecting by driving around and picking up pre-bagged leaves. My town goes around with a big vacuum and sucks them up from curbside, but one town over (where I have most of the rentals) makes people bag them for collection. Hereās an SUV full of leaves I picked up recently. Each of those bags is just under 3ā tall, as they were just able to fit in the back standing up.
While Iām glad that others bag them, at my properties, I just blow the leaves to the edges of the yard, along fences, etc. It makes a good mulch for trees that I plant there. I didnāt need to pull weeds at all in that area, as it lasted for the entire year.
Oaks can take forever to drop their leaves. It makes it pretty inconvenient when there is one tree which hasnāt dropped and all the others have done so a month ago. I want to be able to clear things once and be done, but it isnāt good to delay too long and smother the lawn.
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It would be great to have access to the leaves already in bags. I need to see if any of my neighboring areas does this.
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Itās like being able to get the pre-bagged mulch at Home Depot. But no nasty dyes and it is free, instead of costing three dollars. 
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In colorado we have clay lined dumps. These can absorb oil and many toxic materials all sorts of things without leaking into the water supply.
What destroys our clay lined dumps and leaks toxic materials into our water supply is compost, food waste etcā¦ sent to the dump which creates organic acids which break down the clay where many toxic products will not. Denver used to do free compost and green mulch pick up to stop people from throwing it away. It is also illegal in most all of Colorado to throw away lawn clippings mulch etc but it is not highly enforced and we do not teach people why its so important to compost. I wonder why people throw away organic minerals and nutrients and then go purchase scrap waste fertilizer that is usually a industrial byproduct.
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Not that im lazy but i would not rake leaves due to time constraints but if i had a problem there are many pull behind solutions such as vacuums and inexspensive bags https://www.ebay.com/i/184026736958?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=184026736958&targetid=593772075573&device=m&mktype=pla&googleloc=9015457&poi=&campaignid=2086170226&mkgroupid=76095084174&rlsatarget=aud-412677883135:pla-593772075573&abcId=1141016&merchantid=6296724&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1r3J9vWD5gIVED0MCh3zcQMuEAkYDCABEgIUCfD_BwE
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Looks like it would work well and is affordable.
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This is the method I used. Worked pretty well.
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Im in leaf collecting mode starting now for the next couple months. I get them from piles people put out for collection by the city. I rake onto a tarp and load in the truck. Im sure my neighbors think im wierd. Those bags sure look nice and easy. Wish we had that here. I try to put down a thick layer covering the garden and all my fruit trees too. The goal is for the garden soil to never see the sun because i dont like weeding. The soil is getting dark and sticky after a few years of this. I like unshreded leaves because they suppress weeds better, last longer, and its one less thing to do. The only downside is the ocassional doggy doo in the mix which is a real bummer.
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I had thought about looking around my area for easy to gather leaves.
My neighbors think Im odd anyway.
Im too shy to ask people for their leaves but I have three neighbors with several massive maples and sweetgums. Thats lot of leaves. I give them a little garden produce in the summer, saying āhere are your leavesā.
When Im out walking my dog and see yards with a ton of leaves, Im tempted to offer a service, Iāll rake and haul their leaves away for, say, $20 a truckload. So far I have not done that. Maybe I could leave them a card with my number to call? Just a few truckloads and Iāve paid off my nursery order
I use a plastic snow shovel and rake like a pair of giant salad tongs. The snow shovel holds more than a rake. I load them into my pickup and use a piece of plywood to mash them down.
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I like getting info from text and humor from professional comedians- or from friends in eye to eye conversations.
One thing that struck me was the man doesnāt discuss the possibility of using a leaf rake. Americans are generally starved for exercise and addicted to gadgets that usually donāt work all that well, break quickly and pollute the environment for centuries. Raking is great exercise and metal leaf rakes with wood handles donāt pollute after they are put out to pasture. .
At least he recommends electric ones that donāt make neighborhoods a cacophony of obnoxious sound that disrupts the opportunity of any tranquility in the fall, although I assume only very expensive ones have adequate power. I also like the fact that he mentions how people keep blowing around the same leaves.
I wouldnāt exactly call it a TED talk without a caveat. They are denigrating the brand, IMO.
But Iām sometimes described as a curmudgeon.
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