At long last, autumn arrived at Floating Axe Farm. Real autumn. You know… the part where the leaves drop.
Aside from being beautiful, leaves are useful. If you’re no till/Back to Eden gardening like we are, leaves are your friend. They provide a thick, happy layer of covering for your soil that has the added benefit of creating new planting medium as it decomposes.
The trick, of course, is getting them from the lawn (where they’re a nuisance) to the field (where they’re an integral part of a healthy ecosystem).
It’s pretty basic work: rake, pile, load, move, dump, spread. Over and over and over. And when I say “over and over,” what I mean is for a solid week and a half… and counting.
As the leaves turn, we ooh and ahh… knowing that in a few short days, they’ll be on the ground and in need of manual relocation. Our manual relocation.
It’s hard work. But it can be fun, too. And since we have many hands, the work is definitely lighter. We have rakes of all sizes, and people of all sizes, and a truck that can be filled and then bounce its way into the back fields to be dumped.
We went to bed last night to a carefully swept carpet of grass. We woke up to an ocean of yellow leaves and not a green blade in sight. Over breakfast, we looked at each other knowingly. Time to grab the rakes, kids.