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🍂 Leaf 🍃 Litter 🍁?
The last Saturday in March seems like an awesome opportunity to turn nature’s decorations from my favorite season into a soil supplement for your lovely green yard…
🍂 Change Your Leaves 🍃
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots. ~Victor Hugo
| Part of the charm of 🍂Autumn🍂 is the colorful falling leaves.
The trees resolve to shades of red, yellow, brown and even purple before dropping leaves for the coming season. In nature,those fallen leaves accumulate on the forest floor to form a blanket for the ❄️ Winter ❄️. |
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Also in nature, the darling woodland creatures travel around the forest gathering food for their hibernation, hunting up food to fatten themselves for hibernation or just wandering around the woods for food if they do not hibernate.
This crunches and breaks the dry leaves. Cover that with a lovely blanket of snow and nature begins a slow compost cycle. When the weather turns warm again and the bugs begin to awaken, they nibble at the bottoms of the leaves or work on the leaf shards that were broken up as animals traveled to and fro. |
| In our yards, things are a bit different.
We don’t have the same conditions as a deep forest, so we need to take matters into our own hands. We can transform our leaf litter into a nutritive soil ingredient to spruce up our yards. |
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🍁 The Worm Turns 🍂
Basic: Leaf litter
Turns out, there are more things involved in the natural composting process I mentioned above. Here’s a quick video on how that plays out.
So, if you’re looking at your yard and seeing last year’s leaves all over the place, there are some options for you.
I happen to like that one from the little short video above. Mow that mess! Chop it all up in place.
Why? Because the April showers are coming. Shredded leaf shards and bits plus water plus the stuff from the video above = soil.
Does it happen instantly? Nope.
Does it look great? Who cares?
Does it turn what Mother Nature gave you for free into an ingredient for soil? Yep.
Here are some more tips on how to fast forward your composting if you’re more about the raking up instead of shredding it where it falls.
Super Fast Leaf Composting Trick
🍃 General Principles 🍁
General principles… are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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For me, the most important leaves in my headspace are the digital page pairs in my manuscripts.
From book terminology, a “leaf” is a physical page, front and back. I have filled quite a few of these. |
| Book 1 is The Sentinels: New Blood and has 345 pages or 173 leaves.
Book 2 is The Sentinels: Price of Engagement and has 368 pages so far or 184 leaves This pattern is working for me in general principle and is likely to over the lifespan of the project. |
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Aesop observed: “The reed (or willow) that bends in the wind survives, while the oak that resists is broken.”
My original concept was to have a book for each of the 13 years of the chronicle, but given that Book 1 covers 21 days and Book 2 covers 14 days, the 13 books would have been back-breaking tomes. Book 3, The Sentinels: Heartstrings, will run from April 9 through May 29. A span of 51 days. This book is a long breath after the pressure cooker of The Sentinels: Price of Engagement, so the events won’t be as packed together as they were in books 1 and 2. We’ll see the heat turned back up in books 4 (The Sentinels: Threat Matrix) and 5 (The Sentinels: Aftershocks). For now, I have to finish up David Harz’s “sealing” ceremony to wrap up book 2, so I’m going to go write that a while… |
That’s all for today. See you back on Wednesday for April 🚿☔🛀🏻 showers…