http://www.care2.com/greenliving/dealing-with-fall-leaves-the-eco-friendly-way.html
Dealing With Fall Leaves the Eco-Friendly Way
By Amy Stodghill, Green Options
The changing colors of the autumn leaves are beautiful - until they’re no longer on the trees and instead are covering your yard. Here are a couple of ways to be green with the fall colors.
Skip the leaf blower and use a rake. While it’s a little more labor intensive, raking leaves is better for the environment than the leaf blower. Leaf blowers create a lot of noise pollution, and — if they’re diesel powered — create a fair amount of air pollution as well (unless you’re running on bio-diesel).
Don’t burn your leaves. Once you’ve got the leaves raked in nice piles, go ahead and jump in them, but don’t burn them. Burning creates a lot of smoke, especially when leaves are damp, and releases particulate matter and toxic compounds.
Do compost or mulch. Some areas offer yard waste pick up in addition to garbage collection and curbside recycling.
However, if you don’t have yard waste pick up mulch or composting are much better options. Care2 has simple suggestions on composting and/or mulching your leaves.
Green Options Media is a network of environmentally-focused blogs providing users with the information needed to make sustainable choices. Written by experienced professionals, Green Options Media’s blogs engage visitors with authoritative content, compelling discussions, and actionable advice. We invite anyone with questions, or simply curiosity, to add their voices to the community, and share their approaches to achieving abundance.
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6 comments
add your comment »Where we live, we have deciduous trees, pine, cedar and chestnuts - along with them we have a lot of droppings. I love to use the pine needles to mulch the pathways in my yard. They break down eventually, and that adds nutrients back to the soil; the native plants enjoy it; the invasive weeds are smothered; and, it's free! We shred the burrs from the chestnuts, along with fallen branches and pine cones, etc., and add it to free horse manure we pick up at our local horse farms, and let the pile sit, over winter during our rainy season - then we add that mix to our gardens the following year! Our only cost for all of this is our personal energy, electricity for the mulcher and gas for truck. We're frugal and at the same time, we help the environment!
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Composting is nature's way of recycling. When you compost, you convert vegetable scraps, leaves, grass clippings and other materials into a useful soil builder. It is an aerobic process that requires oxygen and under the right conditions, microorganisms grow and multiply, converting the original organic material into a more stable, usable product.
r4ds
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You can also add the leaves to your worm compost - it's great worm bedding.
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Yey..........raking helps to exercise at the same time too ! Thanks for these suggestions :)
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Tilling into the garden is good. You can also run the leaves over with your lawnmower - without the grass-catcher bag attached - and turn them into mulch for your lawn. It is amazing how piles of leaves reduce down to nothing. If you like, you can leave the bag on the mower and allow it to capture the chopped up leaves, then spread that on your gardens for a winter mulch and turn it into the soil in the spring.
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A friend of mine tills his fallen leaves into his gardens. In the spring the soil is healthy and rich, ready for planting.
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