Mulching Leaves (Best of 2021)

For this year's annual roundup of my favorite culture and entertainment, I have one item: mulch. 

In past years, we rented a car and drove to a nursery in Westchester, where we bought six to ten bags of mulch. Each bag was staggeringly heavy, and I always dreaded carrying them from the car to the garden. This year, however, we didn't get around to buying mulch. Stephen was no longer working at home, the summer seemed to extend into November, I injured my knee, and Elektra was not doing well. (Also, the world was ending, which is distracting.) The idea of renting a car and driving ninety minutes (each way) to get mulch was too much to contemplate. Looking out at the leaf-covered garden, I was inclined to just leave them ('leaf' them lol?) and see what happened. "It works in nature," I said to Stephen, who (via the internet) learned that while it's fine to leave leaves, you must first chop them up into tiny pieces if you don't want to encourage the growth of unhealthy molds and pests, which we did not. 

Three days later, after borrowing a leaf mulcher at our local, government-funded organic recycling facility (part of our divisional commune), we had a leaf mulcher. That's all fabricated, but it's something I thought about as we clicked 'buy' on [massive online multinational corporation]. Why couldn't the government, in addition to offering healthcare for everyone, have a lending library for tools and hardware? But that's another discussion. In any event, we were soon equipped with a leaf mulcher. (I meant to take a picture of it in action, but I forgot, so here it is in our basement.) 

I might have been more embarrassed about using such a loud, suburban apparatus if I had not already acclimated myself over the past few years to using a leaf blower. This thing is definitely (hopefully) the closest I will ever get to using a grenade launcher. But with apologies to my neighbors, I had within about twenty minutes corralled the leaves into a big pile, which I spent the next twenty minutes feeding into the equally loud mulcher. It worked. As promised, the leaves were chopped up into small pieces (mulch). Instead of setting out five or six large garbages of leaves on the curb, I spread the transformed leaves (mulch) around on the garden beds. For me, it was the highlight of 2021. 

The garden was transformed. The mulch looked very natural and organic, unlike the aggressively red, brown, or black tones you often see in store-bought varieties. 

In a few days, 2021 will be just another year lost to the fog of our dying society. It's not a year I will remember fondly, except for one thing: mulch, and specifically mulching my own leaves, henceforth known as 'self-mulching.' [I'm open to suggestions on that front, however :)]

Next year and every when that follows, I will remember 2021 and think, it was not such a bad year ... for mulch. 

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Comments

[Sarah]

I LOVE MULCH! I actually had no idea there was an actual device to mulch leaves (but then again we're suburban dwellers with a lawn mower that does the job.) Your garden is beautiful and I wish you many happy gardening adventures in the new year!