Bounty from the tree canopy

This week a bewildered neighbor walking her dog saw me out raking the gutter across the street from home and asked whether I was cleaning up the neighborhood. “No,” I said, “It’s for compost. Biomass.” 

Why waste organic material?

     Oak blossoms, called catkins, had piled up on sidewalks and in the gutters. Just about every surface was sprinkled with those lacy brown chains of tiny flowers that had chosen the previous week to drop from the trees en masse. 

They're everywhere

To many, they looked like litter for the street sweeper to deal with. To me, they offered a great opportunity to add some organic material to the compost piles.

    Oaks, like many tall trees, depend on wind for pollination. That’s why they don’t bother making showy, colorful flowers and why they produce so much pollen. 

Strings of male oak flowers, like beads on a chain

The wind carries the yellow dust everywhere, to the chagrin of allergy sufferers and everyone who has to clear it from a windshield. Once their work is done, the catkins drop from the trees. I find the sheer mass of them awe-inspiring. What a vast amount of tree energy went into producing that huge volume of flowers!

     If I swept the oak catkins up and threw them into the yard waste, I’d be interrupting the soil cycle. In the forest, leaves, branches, and tree flowers fall to the ground and decompose there, becoming part of the soil that in turn nourishes the trees. 

Every part of a tree is recycled in the forest

    If those oak catkins were carted off my property to the distant industrial composting site that receives the city’s yard waste, then what my big oak tree drew from the soil to make those flowers wouldn’t be replenished. I’d be sending away nutrients and photosynthetic energy that could be here powering the garden ecosystem. 

Headed for the yard waste composting site

    Of all the compostable materials I cart to the piles in the course of the year, these oak blossoms are a favorite. They’re light and easy to gather with a rake or broom. Loading them into the wheelbarrow is a cinch. And they decompose really fast.

    Bigger pieces of plant tissue that are defended against decomposition, such as tough, leathery oak leaves, take a full two years to decompose in my compost bins. I don’t even try to compost twigs, because it would take too long. I could speed up the process by turning the piles, but I’ve got other priorities for limited gardening time. Tiny, fluffy oak catkins break down much faster, because they’ve got lots of surface area relative to their size. If I dug through the piles this fall, I’d find that soil organisms had already blended the catkins into the half-made compost.

Oak catkins break down fast into usable compost

    Another thing I appreciate about oak flowers is that they don’t come with seeds. Maples drop a bounty of organic material in spring too, those winged samaras that twirl to the ground, each carrying two seeds. I don’t compost those because so many germinate in the piles. Acorns won’t be viable until fall, so I can compost oak catkins and not worry about inadvertently planting trees.

Maple seeds-best kept out of the compost

Abetting the soil cycle

I’ve learned something new from ecological garden designer Larry Weaner: soil can be too rich. In Garden Revolution, Weaner describes telling contractors that he doesn’t want to add topsoil, compost or fertilizer before he plants a meadow. They think he’s crazy to turn down traditional first steps for establishing a new landscape. His point is that the plants he’s going to be growing can outcompete weeds in lean soil but not in soil that’s full of nutrients and organic matter. Those will only jump-start invasive weeds.

Northeastern meadow plants such as goldenrod thrive on lean, dry soil

    Weaner and other ecological gardeners aim to restore and imitate natural processes. When he plants a native meadow, he works with the soil that’s present and the plants that are adapted to grow on it. How does this principle apply in my garden setting, which becomes more like a woodland every year as the trees grow taller?

The yard is starting to resemble a clearing in a forest

    Last fall I doubled down on my strategy of letting fall leaves lie on the garden through the winter. Some of those will be raked off to mix with wood chips in the sheet composting experiment. The rest will stay where they are under trees and shrubs. 

    Bagging up and sending away those fall leaves would deplete my own soil, because what the trees drew from the soil to make leaves wouldn’t be replenished through decomposition. Trees have their own recycling operation going, if we just stay out of the way. I want those leaves on the ground, and not just to provide shelter for native insects in various stages of development. They’re also there to build soil that will nourish plants and sequester carbon.

Leaves on the ground serve important purposes

     But is it possible that the leaves and the compost I spread around will make my sandy soil too rich? Not for the woodland plants I want to grow. 

     A neighbor told us that our yard was once part of a gravel quarry. That’s easy to believe when I dig through a thin layer of topsoil and hit sand and gravel. If this were an unsettled area, it would probably be an oak-hickory woodland, the most common plant community for the region. The ground would be covered with forest duff—fallen leaves and twigs that would gradually break down and become part of the soil.

What the yard would look like without human intervention?

    In my garden I want to foster this soil cycle that converts leaves to humus and back to leaves again. The natural system will maintain the right nutrient balance.

    Over the years I’ve focused hard on making compost, and I still love the idea that you can turn garden waste into something great for your soil and plants. But by moving dead plants and fall leaves to the compost piles, I’ve been taking them away from where they’d otherwise decompose in place. Then I have to load compost into the wheelbarrow to replace organic material in the spots I removed it from. That’s starting to seem foolish.

Why carry compost ingredients to the pile and back?

    By letting the leaves compost where they fall, I hope to imitate the natural process more closely—and save work, too.

Witch hazel is blooming. Can spring be far off?

I'll be away for two weeks. See you the week of March 18.

Nature or "all-natural" products?

There’s a thriving market for organic lawn care in my town. These contractors offer periodic fertilizing and even pest control with certified organic products. 

Organic lawn service

Intrigued, I met with Jim Agabedis of Minuteman Landscaping in June 2013 to see about switching to lawn care on sustainable principles.

    Jim had a lot of sensible advice to offer. Some was about switching to better-informed practices, such as letting clippings compost in place on the lawn, changing mower blades frequently so they cut rather than tear the grass, weeding by hand instead of spreading weed killer, and aerating sections of lawn where telltale plantain indicates compaction. 

Could the lawn benefit from organic methods?

Another part of his advice was about “product.” That’s where I started to feel ambivalent.
 

    Jim had a compelling story of how he decided to switch from conventional to organic lawn care. He started his business while he was still in college and built it up to 360 accounts. Then an acquaintance shared a one-page article on lawn care without chemicals, and he had an epiphany. 

     Most of his clients didn’t make the transition to organic, but he fought his way back. He said it’s worth it to avoid practices and products that could make people or pets sick. 

Not the approach Jim was aiming for

The lawns his company cares for testify to the effectiveness of his method.

     I didn’t end up hiring Jim’s company. I was looking for weekly lawn mowing informed by organic principles. He was offering something more ambitious: a commitment to a beautiful organic lawn. For me, it’s not worth the money, and it's not the direction I'm heading.
 
    I could see that Jim’s approach was better than conventional lawn care, but I balked at the idea of a lawn, or any other garden area, depending on application of lots of purchased products for health or survival. Jim proposed to apply benign products such as compost pellets and compost tea. 

Spreading compost on a lawn

That’s the organic approach I’d pursue if I had enough time, motivation, and compost to get serious about lawn care. 

     Ideally, though, the compost I’d apply to our lawn would be made up of decomposed materials from our own yard. That way I’d be imitating the natural soil cycle, where organic materials such as leaves and branches decompose on the ground and build soil. 

Organic material cycles back into soil

    I have a problem with replacing chemicals from the garden center or big box store—weed killers, pesticides, synthetic fertilizer—with pricey organic products purporting to fill the same roles. It’s better than the old way, but it’s still a paradigm we should be moving away from.

     Now I see the garden as a community of plants and animals. I aim to enrich and protect it by letting natural processes do their work freely, 

Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) blooming this week

rather than just by replacing synthetic products with store-bought “natural” ones.


This is SEG’s 100th post! Thanks for reading. It’s great to know that we share the same gardening pleasures and concerns.