Fall Clean Up: Use What You Got

Looks like I made the right call by refusing to rake leaves until they had all fallen. That decision was not only more efficient, but it also set us up to take our time with the fall clean-up over the long holiday weekend, and it let us do it in the comfort of temperatures in the mid-60s. It was a little disorienting to feel like three seasons were mixing together, but it was way more enjoyable than it usually is.

We have taken down several trees since we moved in, but we still have a gigantic maple in the front yard. This tree manages to dump leaves absolutely everywhere, so raking is a pretty big job (there are two other deciduous trees in the back that contribute too, but nowhere near the way the big one does). It's good to have lots of help:

The kids did a lot of jumping, but they also stood on the tarp to hold it down while Kirk pushed the leaves onto it. Then everyone grabbed a corner to lug the pile to the back. This was repeated several times.

While that was happening on one side of the front yard, I was on the other side cleaning up the perennial border. As you may recall, the last thing I did in there was cover it with netting to try to deter the squirrels that were digging up the newly-planted bulbs. I won't know until spring how well it worked, but in the meantime, that netting was doing a bang-up job of catching and holding leaves:

This picture doesn't really do it justice, because I took it after I had pulled up all the netting, so lots of the leaves were taken with it. It was a tedious task to pick out all the leaves tangled up in the netting, but that stuff is way too expensive to just throw away. Besides, we'll need it next year for the berries.

Anyway, after a couple days of dealing with the netting and the leaves and trimming back the plants that are dying back, it now looks more like this:

Not as much to look at as it was in August, but I really like the way an almost-dormant bed looks once it's groomed. The front yard, at least, is ready for snow.

What to do with all those leaves? We are definitely not the types who bag up a valuable resource and send it to the dump. First, we used a whole tarp-load to mulch over the garlic we planted earlier this fall:

Because we planted soft neck varieties that grow in Mediterranean areas, we need to mulch the garlic to protect it for the winter. There's a good four to six inches of dried leaves covering them now. We put netting over the leaves and held it down with some scraps of brick from the patio to keep it all in place. The last thing we need is a big wind to blow it all away!

Side note: Almost every single garlic clove came up! It didn't occur to me to take a picture of the shoots until after we had already mulched over them, but a few tall ones are poking up out of the mulch:

Since the leaf-and-netting mulching technique worked well with the garlic, I also mounded some small piles of leaves over the new roses and hydrangea in the perennial border:

I realize that this looks like I just went and ruined all the raking and cleaning out of the perennial border that I just finished, but at least the piles are (so far) neat and compact. Hopefully they'll stay that way with the help of the netting. Even if they don't, they will likely be covered with snow soon enough. Besides, who can argue with giant piles of free mulching material?