Gardeners can be a notoriously parsimonious lot. They use plastic grocery bags to pass along pass-along plants; they harvest seeds from dying annuals to replant next year; they use milk jugs and Dixie cups as pots to start plants; they pick up acorns, which they miraculously convert into oak seedlings.
Some, the more brash ones, help themselves to the bags of leaves that this time of year show up on curbs like mushrooms after a spring rain. It’s simply a matter of who gets there first, city sanitation workers or the uninhibited gardener.
A thick blanket of leaves on a garden not only buffers the dormant plants beneath from weather extremes, it attracts worms and micro-organisms that over the winter transform the brown matter into nourishing humus. Mulch also retains moisture and retards weed growth.
Thanksgiving about an hour before sunset, I set out for a walk on Southside. After a pleasant exchange with the enchanting Edwina Williams, aka Mother Goose, who was greeting passersby from her front yard, and then looping through Friendship Cemetery, I headed back toward downtown on Second Street.
There beside Wil and Dorothy Colom’s house were 30-plus picture-perfect bags of sycamore leaves.
White plastic bags, all filled to the same level and carefully arranged, as though Martha Stewart had happened by and raked their yard, or, at the least, arranged the result.
There was a nice stash in front of Riverview, too. The bags were black plastic and tied up, in which case you have to pat them to make sure they’re not full of sticks or magnolia leaves.
Do not put magnolia leaves in your compost pile. Your red worms won’t have anything to do with them and they take forever to break down. You might as well toss styrofoam cups onto the muck.
So, first thing Friday morning it was back to the Lawyers Colom to get three pickup loads of leaves.
Bob Raymond, a fellow leaf scavenger, said an article in an organic gardening magazine got him in the leaf business.
The piece was written by a gardener who routinely blankets her garden plot with leaves over the winter. A spring soil test indicated the decomposed leaves provided her garden every nutrient it needed.
Bob uses the leaves for his garden and to cover bare spots on his farm, which, he says, encourages grass growth.
“I’m more cautious than I used to be,” Raymond said, “because I’ve gotten bags full of junk.”
Not to wax overly philosophic, but in a world where everything seems to have a price tag, where recycling is more a topic of dinner-table conversation than an actuality, it’s nice to be able to take what many view to be trash and convert it to gardening treasure.
“I also love it when people put their pumpkins on the street,” Raymond said. “My cows love pumpkins.”
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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