Recycling Soil Nutrients

If you are used to western methods of gardening then you are used to removing leaves and grass clipping from your yard and either burning them or throwing them away in the garbage and watching garbage trucks take it away.

However, did you know that this devitalizes your soil because all the leaves and the garden clippings were part of the nutrient cycle of your soil? So when you remove leaves and garden clippings you are also removing a part of the vitality of your soil every time you remove them from your property. Over time this causes you to have to enrich your soil with fertilizer or other means.

However, if you found a way to not take leaves and garden clippings away from your yard it could save you hundreds of dollars in fertilizer and other nutrients over the years.

An exception to this would be pine needles and to some degree oak leaves as well. And there may be other tree leaves and needles in this category. Pine needles are a part of the pine trees strategy to keep other plants from growing near the pine trees. Only little pine trees grow well and very few others like pine needle mulch. To a lesser degree this is true of oak leaves as well. Different trees have similar strategies of survival.

What I try to do as much as possible is to leave leaves and grass clippings in place as much as is possible. If you don't like the way they look you can put them in your compost and respread it over your garden areas later. However, the most labor saving device is to just leave them in place.

In a time of conscious recycling of most other things, recycling garden waste can be helpful to keep your soil alive too. So if you are an organic gardener, be sure to recompost what you don't eat back into your soil too.