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My neighbor Phil convinced me to ditch the leaf blower this fall
I used to blow every single leaf off my property in Burlington, thinking it was the only way to keep the yard tidy. Phil, who's been living off the grid up in the hills for 15 years, told me I was wasting gas and killing the soil life. He showed me how his garden mulched leaves into free compost over winter, and the worms did the work for him. This year I just mowed over the leaves and let them lay on the beds, and my spring garden came in better than ever. Anyone else made the switch from blowing to mulching their leaves?
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evan29518d ago
Yeah that's a fair point @sean_walker45, wet leaves can definitely gum things up. I only mow when the leaves are dry and brittle, takes a few extra passes but it works fine. What really got me thinking is how this whole thing is part of a bigger pattern I keep noticing in my life. So many of the "must do" things we learn are just habits we never question, like the leaf blower guy or the pressure washer guy or even the guy who tells you to rake every single pine needle. Once you stop and actually watch what nature does on its own, you realize most of that busy work is just us fighting against something that was already working fine. My neighbor Chuck spent years spraying his lawn with weed killer and fertilizer, then one dry summer his whole lawn just gave up and died while the "messy" lawns around him stayed green. Small stuff like this has a way of snowballing into a different way of seeing the whole picture, at least in my experience.
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