Autumn Leaves

I've just been fishing them out the pond Amy never ending job shouldn't have made the pond so near the wood, to big to net, I accidently fished out a fish to usually they're so fast but not this time of year, good job he moved in the pile of leaves or I wouldn't have seen him ooops.

Lol .. poor fishy Kathy i'm glad you saw him move in time ! I don't much like this job of raking up leaves you get one lot raked up and another lot falls down or the wind blows them away :o(

In my favs because I just love heaps of autumn leaves and can almost smell that lovely, earthy smell!

Thanks Chris , Me to I love the autumn smells .......

Hard to keep on top of this job what with all the wind we are gating here at the moment..

I didn't get around to taking them away ,They might be all over the garden again tomorrow !!

Good job Amy, just think of the compost. You can imagine, we have alot to tidy, the question is, do you wait until they all fall? Never seems a good plan as winter then sets in and you never collect them. Tireless job.

Shall you bag them up Amy? Lovely photo too.

In my last garden we were peer pressured into raking and bagging...the last few years I decided...no more of this!...so I raked the leaves into a pile and mulched them with the lawn mower and built my front garden soil with them. when they are mulched fine they break down very readily. In this garden I have acres and acres and frankly, no energy to attempt such a thing on this scale. The leaves will be mulch mowed and left to enrich the soil where they fell! I must be getting smarter ( ;-) )as I get older...otherwise...I'm just lazy! lol... Oh to subtract a few years from the tally. Some days I don't feel a day over twenty....and then most days...welllll.

Dawn / Janey I'm always tempted to let Nature do it's own thing but 'you know who' likes to get as many cleared up as possible we do bag some up Janey but a lot go in the compost heaps ... Lori I don't know how you cope with acres or find the energy you are definitely not lazy I'm not at all surprised that some days you feel drained ! we have mulched them with the lawn mower I suppose we could put them through the shredding machine !

I've tried several times to turn fallen leaves into 'rich brown compost' but never really succeeded. Black bags were a failure and the perforated dustbins I use at the moment just takes years to rot down. I wonder if it the type of trees nearby? Oh for a row of compost heaps like Monty Don has :)

Gee I must admit our Black Bags are never very successful at making compost it takes so long , we have two compost bins side by side made from wooden pallets each 4ft square we fill one and then turn the other one out annually we keep a square of carpet over the filled one it encourages it to break down into good compost ,it's amazing how hot it gets in there , it makes some good stuff ! OH dived in one year disturbing a wasps nest he was covered in wasps and stings :o(

Your poor hub! I sympathise completely about the wasp stings...I was stung a total of eight times this season. First i ran over a nest beside my little veggie bed with the lawnmower and with the noise of the mower I didn't hear the warning hummmmm...the first sting felt like someone had stabbed me in the thigh. All the stings were very painful for days, and bothersome for weeks...and they were months fading away to angry red spots! They were trying to colonize the soffits above our backdoor as well and I sprayed it with wasp stuff...(anger and pain made me forget my aversion to insecticide) I was sweeping dead wasps off the deck and one fell down the back of my neck and into my tshirt...stung me numerous times before I could get rid of it. It was in it's death throes from the poison but i got the worst of it. This past summer seemed to be a burgeon year for them...they were everywhere!
I know I should go out and turn over our compost heap but I've let it get away on me...and bittersweet is growing in it ...the tangle of roots and shoots defeats even a pitchfork! Makes me feel like a soldier... the struggle continues! lol. But I did find that mulching the leaves speeds the composting. Oak leaves take the longest to degrade and I keep all the walnut leaves out of the compost heap altogether. I have so much to learn!

Your compost bins sounds ideal, Amy, but I just haven't room for anything like that. Never mind, the wheelie bin can take some and I will start another lot in the dustbin and be patient :) Very strange, although branches broke off the nearby trees very few leaves came down on their own!

We are lucky to have room for the composting Gee I don't know what we would do without them , Poor you Lori that was nasty and painful .when they attacked OH he ran indoors I was trying to push him out and pull his tops off at the same time because I didn't want them in the house , we had a nest in the loft one summer the wasps were somehow getting through into the airing cupboard amongst our linen , the last time we had one it was the whole length of our summer house OH decided he would wait until it was dark and then dressed in protective clothes plus a crash helmet on his head he looked as if he was going into space , his reasoning was that if it was dark the wasps would be dozy then the silly man went up the stepladder and shone the torch into the nest waking them up making them fly straight out at him , he nearly fell off the ladder !

Oh, gosh, I still have all the leaves to do!

It's getting a bigger problem every day Dave as more come down , it's a pity we can't hire some leaf eating animal to let loose in the garden LOL ....