In cities we spend huge amounts of human and fossil energy raking, blowing and carting them off – not to mention the thousands of plastic bags used to hold them.

In the country we tend to simply let them fall and ignore them.

But the millions of leaves that fall from our broadleaf trees each year represent a bounteous harvest far too few people ever realize.  How about you?

Dead Leaves for Feed and Bedding

Do you have sheep, goats or small animals?  Do you pay good money for hay and bedding material?  And do you have hardwood trees on your property?  If so, you may have overlooked a plentiful and inexpensive source of bedding and winter feed.

Aspen and other leaves have been used to bed down animals for centuries.  While not as absorbent as straw or shavings, the price is right and collection is usually a snap.  The leaves are also easily composted along with manure for a highly nutritious additive to your garden soil.

Dry leaves can also be used like hay as a winter staple for certain animals, such as sheep and rabbits.  Just be sure to exercise proper caution:  certain species, like black walnut and cherry, contain toxins in their leaves.  Be sure to check with a veterinarian to be sure your tree species are compatible with your animals.

Digging Dry Leaves

Dead leaves are also great for your garden.  Dig them into the soil in fall or spring to enrich your garden and make your soil loose and friable.  And a layer of leaves (shredded or whole) makes great mulch.  Again, be careful of the species you use, especially walnut or anything aromatic.   For a good lazy man’s mulch for garden beds, just blow the leaves off your yard and onto the beds.

You can also use dry leaves as a carbon-rich element in your compost pile.  They’re especially great for urban gardeners to layer in with kitchen scraps.  And if you’re into worm composting, shredded leaves make excellent bedding for the wriggly little critters!  If you also have grass clippings, mix them in with the leaves for a nitrogen boost.

Next time you’re faced with the prospect of raking up a bunch of leaves, don’t just sigh and resign yourself to the work.  Think of it as a bonus, and enjoy the harvest!

Ah, September. Basking in the sun. Bringing in summer’s bounty. And…swatting yellow jackets.

These ubiquitous little wasps come out of hiding in late summer and fall as their colonies mature. Adult yellow jackets feed mostly on sugars – flower nectar and fruit (and soda pop when they can get it.) The growing larvae prefer meat and other protein – and reward the adults who feed it to them with a sweet substance they excrete. But as the summer wears on and the larvae grow up, the adults begin to search more aggressively for their daily sugar fix. That’s when they begin to make pests of themselves at picnics and other places where people enjoy food outdoors.

Yellow jackets are some of the most aggressive critters out there. It’s nearly impossible to live in the country for any length of time without experiencing their painful sting – which they can inflict again and again. So you’ll want to do all you can to learn to deal with yellow jackets effectively. And there are plenty of ways to do it without resorting to noxious poisons.

Discouraging Yellow Jacket visits

First, understand that yellow jackets are scavengers. The best way to discourage them is to make sure you’re not attracting them. Keep your garbage sealed, cover the kitchen scraps in your compost pile with a layer of hay, dirt or other neutral material, and process your harvest indoors when possible. Bring uneaten food or open beverage bottles in from the picnic table or porch.

It’s also a good idea to fix holes in screen doors and make sure your home is free of cracks and crevices for them to nest in.

How to act around yellow jackets

If a yellow jacket hovers around you or lands on you, don’t panic. Yellow jackets don’t like fast movements and are more likely to sting people who jump around and swat at them. (That’s why kids are so often the victims of yellow jacket stings.) Move slowly and deliberately and you’ll probably be fine. It helps to remember that it’s just looking for food and won’t get aggressive unless it feels threatened.

Yellow jackets are attracted to bright and dark colors. So if you’re going to a picnic or other area where yellow jackets congregate, stick to white or other light neutral-colored clothing.

Also, make sure you wipe your kids’ faces and hands after they’ve eaten anything sweet.

Treating yellow jacket stings

No matter how careful you are, chances are you’re eventually going to get stung. Yellow jacket stings are painful but rarely serious (unless you’re allergic to bees or step in a nest and get stung hundreds of times.)

Yellow jackets have smooth stingers which usually don’t get stuck in the flesh. You’ll want to wash the area and put ice on it right away. Putting some meat tenderizer on the sting can help with the swelling. So can taking an over-the-counter antihistamine. If you experience any swelling of your tongue or throat, waste no time in getting medical attention.

Killing Yellow Jackets

Finally, if the wasps are a real problem and you want to take out the nest, you don’t have to resort to nasty poisons. Try this trick first: Fill a 5 gallon bucket half full of sand and quickly upend it over the nest entrance (yellowjackets usually nest below ground.) Do this at night when they’re not active. In the morning they’ll burrow up through the sand but won’t be able to get back down. Leave the bucket there for a few days (weighting it down is a good idea) and your yellowjacket troubles should be over.

How’s your garden coming along?  Start any new beds this year?  Yes?

So how’s your back – ready for a nice hot Epsom salt soak?

It may be too late for this year, but there’s no reason ever to strain your back or arms starting a new garden bed again.

Lazy gardeners – Rejoice! Eco-gardeners, too!  With lazy gardening, you don’t ever have to go through the slow, hard, blister-raising labor of breaking sod again.  Nor do you have to use a smelly, noisy, gas-sucking tractor or plow.  All you have to do is spread stuff around.

The idea is to mulch the heck out of your new plot until it submits to cultivation.  Have you ever picked up an old board that’s been lying out in the field for a few months? You know how it kills all the grass, and the soil underneath gets all loose and friable from the worms tunneling through?  That’s what you’re going for.

Here’s how to do it:

Starting Your Lazy Garden Bed

1.    Measure out your plot.  The lazy gardening technique works best for home gardens.  If you’re thinking more along the lines of a cornfield, stick with the plow.
2.    Collect a bunch of cardboard boxes – the bigger the better.  Refrigerator boxes are ideal.  Cut them apart into sheets of cardboard.
3.    Get the cardboard really wet.  Like, saturated. If you haul water and want to conserve it the easy way to do this is to let them sit out in the rain.
4.    Get your garden plot really, really wet.  The rain does a great job with this, too.
5.    Lay the soaked cardboard pieces out so they cover your plot.  Make sure the edges overlap, or you’ll get little lines of grass growing up through the cracks.
6.    (You can also use newspapers, if you’re not concerned about the inks in your food plot.  Use lots of layers and make sure they’re soaked.)
7.    If you have it, spread the paper layer with compost.
8.    Now, pile on the mulch!  Anything you’ve got – moldy hay, grass clippings, sawdust, dead leaves, whatever.  If you have extra compost or manure and want to layer that in, so much the better.

Now you have your bed.  Ideally, you’ll want to let it sit for a while, the longer the better.  (I didn’t say this was going to be fast!)

The best time to start a lazy garden bed is in the fall after the harvest.  Usually you’ll have a lot of mulch available at that time, and you can just let it sit until spring.  Very early spring works well, too.

Planting Your Lazy Garden Bed

Don’t even think about direct-sowing the first year.  You’ll want transplants – and make sure they’re big enough that the mulch doesn’t shade them out.  Tomatoes and squash work fine.  Just take a trowel and dig right through the mulch.  Throw a little compost in the bottom of each hole and tuck ‘em in.

When we (sob) moved back to the city a couple years ago I was too busy at work to do much in the way of gardening – but I did take an hour and put in a 3’x 20’ lazy garden bed.  Last summer was the first season.  My tomatoes didn’t do too well (got them in late), but we enjoyed many bouquets of marigolds and zinnias.  This spring I raked back the mulch and the soil looks great – I’ll just dig in a few amendments and it’ll be ready to plant.  I’m looking forward to at least a few meals from our little urban homestead!

I’ve known people who swore they never would have gotten a garden started at all if they hadn’t found out about this method.  Whether you have a bad back, are short on time (but long on patience), or are just plain a Lazy Gardener, give it a try.

Anne Michelsen is co-founder of Marathon Renewable Energy, Inc., specializing in solar hot water systems. You can read more of her work at YourGreenLifestyle.blogspot.com

A recent article from AAP published in stuff.co.nz reported that Australian farmers are becoming greener.  This appears to be happening at a rate much faster than in the U.S.  The article cites that idea that farmers who live closer to the land and depend on the weather are naturally more concerned with issues such as climate change.  A snippet from the longer article:

Research by the National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) shows that Australians’ attitudes to farming and its effect on the environment are now largely positive.

Any sceptics still believing that the men and women who grow our food and earn so much of Australia’s export income don’t care about the environment need only look at the programme for this week’s inaugural NFF congress in Brisbane.

The 300 delegates to Australia’s peak farming body’s national congress attended sessions on climate change, water and its use, and genetically modified (GM) crops – all key environmental issues.

As well, awareness of environmental issues pervaded sessions on food marketing, new technologies, and the coming global food crisis.

Farmers live closer to the soil and to the weather than the rest of us – and in their environmental awareness it shows.

I’m afraid we are pretty far behind in the U.S.  We’re just beginning to become greener.

A while back a company was making “Barnyard Tea” in actual tea bags. According to sites selling the stuff:

“A Canadian company has devised a method of drying organic manure, preserving the nutrients and removing all odors. Then they package it in standard tea bags. Being made from a blend of cow, chicken, pig and horse manure, it is great for fertilizing house plants, seedlings and transplants.”

The stuff looks way too much like herb tea for my “taste.” I wonder how many boxes were sold and then used as practical jokes? Move over whoopee cushion.

That failed product has not stopped another company, “Authentic Haven Brand” from selling somewhat larger bags of poop that are designed for the same purpose. These bags are significantly larger, and much less likely to be confused with the kind intended for human consumption. You can even choose between cow manure, horse manure, and alfafa – the latter intended for roses. It looks like some really high-class sh.. stuff too. According to Annie Havens their tea is “pure manure tea. Harvested, sun dried, Eco-hand packaged from the by-product of Haven raised grass fed livestock only.” She goes on to say

“It’s not the manure I am selling as much as it is the purity of the Manure I’m selling! We’re the real Green Deal here. Do you know what the cattle and horses have been fed, that your manure comes from, chances are No! Have they been medicated, wormed, antibiotics fed to them?”

Okay, so it’s not just high class, it’s really green too.

Manure tea, by the way, is an organic plant food. It’s the organic gardener’s version of Miracle Grow. Organic gardeners (and others) use it in the garden and on container plants. It adds good stuff beyond what you get from chemical fertilizers.

You can also make your own manure tea, of course. This is what I recommend (even though Annie makes a good case for knowing what the animals ate). Real rednecks make their manure tea from scratch. Here are two articles that will teach you to do this:

• Bruce Zimmerman’s recipe uses a pillowcase to make large batches of the stuff.
• Willi Galloway suggests that you just dump the manure in a bucket full of water, and then strain it later.

If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, try Annie’s product.

Reduce Reuse Recycle – the saying goes. And there’s no better way to do all 3 than by creating and using your own compost. Here’s how we do it in our home.

Our compost has two stages: the kitchen compost and the garden/yard compost:

Kitchen Compost:

In the kitchen we have a small pail* with a sealed lid that we use for almost all our kitchen scraps. (By “pail” and “bucket”, incidentally, we mean a plastic coffee can, non-dairy creamer container, or Cool Whip container. You don’t have to buy anything special to put your compost in.)

• That includes: raw and cooked vegetables and fruits, all grains and carbohydrates, eggs (raw & cooked) and eggshell.
• That doesn’t include: meat, dairy, non-food items
• Coffee grounds are also compostable. However, if too much of your kitchen compost is coffee grounds, it can make your compost too acidic. How we heavy coffee drinkers do it is keep a separate bucket* (also with a lid) for our coffee grounds (biodegradable filters too) and sprinkle it into our garden & yard compost over time.

Garden & Yard Compost:

We have two garden & yard compost bins, both homemade out of little more than a couple of plastic 33 gallon trash pails.

One of our garden/yard composts produces a solid compost that looks anywhere from a rich soil to a muddy sludge. To make this compost we cut some big square vents from around the sides of a 33 gallon plastic trash can, so the compost can breathe – averting mold and mildew – and so that you can see when the compost is ready for use.

Then we put a slightly smaller can inside the bigger one. For us, this is a large plastic flowerpot with enough L-shaped “corners” of plastic around the bottom edge of the trash can so that the compost can breathe, so that resident worms can crawl up inside and help do the work of composting, and ultimately so that the finished compost can drip down from these holes into the base of the larger can.

We rest the flowerpot inside the trash can so that there’s plenty of space in the bottom for compost to fill up. Then we fill up the flowerpot with our kitchen compost. Turning it every now and then and mixing in some nearby mulch, weeds, prunings, dead grass, etc. Then we cover it with a trash can lid and wait.

When a dark brown compost begins to fill up in the bottom, we lift out the flowerpot, scoop out (or dump out) the compost and spread it in our garden beds.

You know the old saying – “You can take the girl out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the girl.”

If you’re a country girl (or boy) at heart but find yourself doing time in the city, don’t despair. There are plenty of things you can do to make yourself feel more at home.

One of my favorite urban homesteading activities is windowsill gardening. If you have a sunny window (south is great but east or west light will work fine, too) you, too can have at least a taste of home-grown goodness. (And windowsill gardening isn’t just for urban homesteaders – even those with big gardens often keep a few indoor pots going for fresh salad during the winter.)

All you need to start are some seeds and a few pots or trays you can fill with soil. If you’re lucky enough to have a sliding glass door you can even set up a tiered wire shelf unit in front of it for a multi-level indoor window garden. (Or try hanging pots of cascading plants – they save space and are pretty, too.)

Here are some suggestions for plants to grow in your windowsill garden:

• Any kind of herb. Herbs are ideal windowsill plants because most grow well in pots, and having them close at hand is a boon to the hurried chef. Try chives, basil, thyme, mint, parsley, lavender, rosemary and scented geranium.
• Baby greens. You can grow baby greens in pots or in trays. Try to find trays that are 3-4” deep. Lettuce, arugula, corn salad, dandelion, and sunflower and buckwheat greens should all grow well in your windowsill garden.
• For hanging plants, try Alpine strawberries or determinate cherry tomatoes. (Look for tomato varieties bred for container gardening.)
• If you’re really ambitious and have the room, you can get some great big pots and try growing tropical fruit trees. Check your gardening catalogs for citrus, banana and fig varieties that do well as container plants.
• Tend your windowsill garden just as you would any houseplants. Don’t forget to feed them at least every two weeks. (For a free and very effective nitrogen-rich fertilizer, just drain the liquid from your meat packaging and add it to the water when you water your plants. Sounds gross but your windowsill plants will reward you for it!)

For just a little effort your windowsill garden will provide you with home-grown flavor throughout the year, even in the city.

Anne Michelsen is co-founder of Marathon Renewable Energy, Inc., specializing in solar hot water systems. You can read more of her work at YourGreenLifestyle.blogspot.com