GRASS- LOVE it or LEAF it?

4/2/7
Grass? Thanx, but no thanx. You may find something endearing about grass, and I’d bet a dollar, if you asked yourself “what?” chances are, it was marketed to you. Even though most of them are flat, those beautifully lush monocropped lawns come at a steep price. They are heavily subsidized by the petrochemical companies of which a multitude of the ag chemicals are derived. Basically, a lawn’s greenness comes from someone else’s greyness. Not to be incongruent, they are also devoid of any biodiversity. I’m a prairie boy and have had the great pleasure to seek out a few of the remaining remnants that was once our great undisturbed prairie like Riding Mountain Provincial Park in Manitoba, Canada. Hearing about the grasses that once existed is like reading the bible. Actually getting down on your knees to look and feel the tangled mat of virgin prairie is like climbing Mount Sinai and meeting the One who has no name first hand. (No wonder my hair is all gray and wispy and my eyes all starry.) It sends my heart pounding thinking about it. It was a solid dreadlock of tangled plants all living together symbiotically. It is said that it is common to have over 300 different plants in one area, each having worked out when to bloom and seed and which niche and strata to catch sun and nutrients. The grasses were of incredible diversity of shape, texture and color. Not to mention the flowers! Their seed heads….! What is it with our culture and uniformity? Diversion to diversity!? Where’s the colloquial quaintness!?! OK Bill, just breathe…..

diversity comes naturally to our environment.

When did we start worshipping Scotts turf builder and Miracle Grow over God and her miracle of growth? How can we have the presumption to create something more beautiful than the Great Spirit? If life is sacred shouldn’t we honor as much of it as we possibly can? On the other hand, my sensible partner, Monica, reminded me that it’s nice to have a little soft grass to sit on and run around in. I’ll give her that. I do enjoy sitting in a park under a shade tree most any time of the year. How many people with half acre lawns do you ever see sitting out on them playing croquet with the kids? The only time I ever see them is when they are on their riding lawn mowers guzzling gas and spewing out burnt oil from their 2 cycle motors. Why do we have to expend so much energy trying to control nature? The Creator does so much better on its own and it is SO MUCH LESS WORK!

So back to grass- mostly I don’t love it so I leaf it. It is so simple. A piece of cardboard and some leaves may be the paradigm shift you’ve been looking for in your life. There is a grassroots movement of people reclaiming their yards by taming the grass lawn with sheets of cardboard and some leaves. Granted It looks a little shabby and brown next to the Jonzes emulation of green lawn they saw on the bag of turf builder, but such is the nature of transition. After a winter of trampling upon these fluffy bran flakes (I encourage the neighborhood kids to have as many leaf fights as they want, a fine dark soil will begin to appear. It is with this medium I wish to share this next entry.

My goal is to see how quickly I can convert a pile of leaves into food production.

I wanted to expand my garden into the grassy lot in which it was located so I had 2 loads of leaves delivered by the city last Fall. This is a free service and you can call Henry Glace from the city @ 771-7221 and he will put you on the leaf list. The city is delighted to save a trip with their trucks all the way out to Azalea park with the stuff. We also benefit as a community because we save our municipality the gas and labor involved in managing these leaves throughout the year as well. If you were to buy the equivalent in bagged mulched it would be in the 1000’s of dollars. A good friend of mine, ,Andrew Goodheart, loves to tell of his neighbors who had bagged their yard waste on the side of the road to be put in the county landfill. The only redeeming part of this story was that they did recycle their bags that once contained mulch from Oregon. If you have any questions of the five fold absurdity of that please go to the comment form on this blog and I would be happy to wax poetically on this. I knew that it will take a year or two for the leaves to break down, but it meant that I didn’t have to have hand to hand combat with the turf. In the meantime, I thought, maybe I could expedite the process with a few innovations of decompositional encouragement. What I know is that leaves are extremely high in carbon and that will eventually give me much valued moisture and nutrient holding capacity in my garden soil, but to get there I needed a bunch of nitrogen. Nitrogen is hard to come by in the city. It is expensive in the form of organic bagged fertilizers or in the form of hauling manures from the outskirts of town in your truck. Neither of which I was excited about to the scale of what it would take to break down 2 truck loads of city leaves which, by the way, spread about a foot deep over and area of 30″x30″. I also want to mention that the leaves delivered by the cities trucks have been chopped up and compressed which makes them unlikely to blow into neighbor’s yard. The more the leaves are chopped the more accessible the nutrients are available to worms and microorganisms which then makes them more accessible to macro organisms like you and me. Another gardener friend of mine, Yankee Frank, has a leaf chopper which is essentially a weedeater on a garbage can. The leaves pass through and get shredded. Yankee Frank has some of the nicest soil I have ever seen and grows sweet potatoes the size of your head! Here’s an idea. What if every neighborhood chipped in to rent a good heavy duty leaf shredder instead of everyone getting their own Black and Decker piece of junk from Walmart/China. We could have our own neighborhood leaf harvesting festivals. A chance for neighbors to get together, help one another out and make their neighborhoods more beautiful. What a great community and soil builder.

The first thing I did with my leaves after spreading them out was to spread pelletized lime down. Leaves, especially oak, is very acidic to start with but will actually become a good source of calcium. Lime is considered the poor man’s fertilizer because it is so cheap and because it frees up the acids in the soil so the soil can hold onto the nutrients that plants need to thrive. You can put all the organic fertilizers on acidic soil and they will just wash away until you achieve the proper PH. You can have your PH tested by the NC extension office for FREE. They will give you a small box with instructions. I also put on all the nitrogen fertilizer I thought I could afford. The cheapest sources are bloodmeals, soybean meal, alfalfa meals… you just have to shop around. A good local source of organic bloodmeals and advice is Asheville Agricultural Systems located just south of the French Broad Food Coop on Banks street. The manager, Mike, has been very informative and has supported my community projects as well. On top of the lime and nitrogen I spread a heavy seeding of winter rye. I put down an annual rye versus a perennial rye so I could could turn it into the soil without any coming back. I did this for a green manure crop that would start breaking down the leaves and adding nutrients. I was then blessed with some good rain and a very warm January. My rye immediately germinated and turned the leaves a lush green! You could hardly see the leaves. Even the indignant Jonzes who had put up a for sale sign were impressed and took the sign back down. After our cold freezes in February the rye turned a reddish color but has since come back in delightful lush green. Call it “leaf camouflage”. Spring is here and my next course of action is to plant some veggies.

I have been gathering precious vegetable waste from various sources about town and have a nice pile of fairly well cooked compost in my bins. I don’t have enough to mix with all the leaves to any effect so I am going to open up some 3′ holes in my leaf pile and mix my compost in with the soil beneath creating, in effect, well mulched garden pots. Garden Islands from which I will plant some space loving plants like melons and skwocsh. Their roots will be nourished from the concentrated amendments, and the vines will run across the expanse of leaves and rye grass. At some point I will turn in the rye as the vines grow. I have planted potatoes as well. They seem to do well planted on top of the soil with mulch but I am skeptical about them producing much from the nutrients available just in the leaves and the soil underneath the cardboard. Perhaps if I amend the soil enough and use the leaves as just a medium to hold those nutrients there will be some productivity. (Note: since this plot will soon be turned into a house I am just leaving the potatoes as they are with no amendments. I am also rolling up the top layer of rye grass and leaves like turf and taking it over to Monica’s house to mulch her beds. I am amazed at the worm activity in the leaves. There are 1000’s of them!) As of the first week in May the potato leaves are quite green but a little leggy. I want to run some trials with variables like potatoes sandwiched in the middle of the leaves, planted on top of the ground, with amendments such as kelp, and maybe with just folliar sprays. Ultimately, with all this activity and input of materials my future garden will be that much closer to full row productivity. I’ll keep you posted.