What A Yard Can Learn From the House it Surrounds

When I see leaves out-cast on the street, I think of what the inside of a home would look like if there were no closets, shelves, or pantry. Clothes would be flung over the furniture. Camping equipment would be piled in a corner of the dining room. The hallway would be cluttered with canned goods and dishes.

Storage is basic to our indoor lives, and yet has somehow gone missing in those outdoor spaces just beyond the front door. We don't make a house presentable for company by tossing all the leftovers in the frig out on the front steps. Somehow a yard is expected to be all living room, all display, without any division of space to accommodate the variety of functions we take for granted indoors. Shrubs could be used to create "rooms", but instead are either pressed against the foundation or along the fenceline.

Thus, when leaves fall, many people feel they have no place to put them other than out on the street, where they represent a hazard for bicyclists and, in this photo, addled parents dropping their kids off for school.

Elsewhere in town, the perception of leaves as litter rather than stowable resource can leave whole lanes blocked for days or weeks.

The alternative involves designing outdoor space to emulate the multi-use partitioning of indoor space. Areas devoted to lawn are like a living room carpet, shrubs are like decorative furniture or walls, trees like a roof. And some out of the way spots serve as closets or pantries, perhaps "walled off" by shrubs.

Dealing with leaves becomes a process of raking them onto a tarp and carrying them off to the "pantry," like wine that will get better with age.

This particular pile of leaves, 10x8x3, looked like a lot, but is mostly fluff, like a big pillow.

The leaves headed to a 6-foot diameter leaf corral which, for demonstration purposes, is integrated into a front yard garden. The pile of leaves from the driveway easily fit in the corral. This year's innovation: the top of the piled leaves was made concave, so that rain will seep into the pile, helping accelerate the decomposition. When a rain comes, the fluffy pile will quickly contract, leaving room for yet another pile of leaves from somewhere else in the yard. Leaf piles continue to reduce in size day by day, which means a leaf corral steadily makes room for more and more material throughout the winter, spring, and summer.

If only closets worked like that.

Maybe it was a youth spent in Wisconsin, driving through farmland dotted with picturesque silos, that makes this frontyard scene seem just as aesthetically pleasing as any other yard on the street. It can be depressing to ride through a town where so many yards are unused, like empty outdoor mansions that are kept swept but devoid of life and utility.

In the photo, the large leaf corral is barely visible behind the tree in the background. The smaller, 3' leaf corral in the foreground is the "Wishing (the earth) Well," which encourages passersby to drop a leaf in and make a wish. It has a central cylinder of critter-proof wire mesh where food scraps get tossed, to decompose while hidden from view by the surrounding leaves. There's no odor because the decomposition process is aerobic.

Each fall, before accepting a new crop of autumn leaves, the Wishing (the earth) Well yields a wheel barrow full of rich compost, to be spread on the vegetable garden.

If only all the unused stuff clogging our homes would magically break down into the building blocks of new life. Yards can learn a lot from houses, and in some ways may come to outshine their teacher. That's the way it oughta be.

This Fall, Corral Those Leaves

I'll never understand why the human race throws certain things away, be it leaves or a hospitable climate. The two seem far different, but it's all one needless and tragic purging, a throwing away of nature's gifts while curiously courting danger, present and future. Some of my most vivid and happy memories from childhood involve leaves. One year I took the white oak leaves in our yard and raked them into rows to make a house, then rode my tricycle through the various rooms. Some leaves we burned, perfuming the autumn air. We'd throw acorns into the embers and wait for them to pop. And there's the memory of the whole family raking leaves down the hill, a row of leaves, dancing before us in bright sunlight, growing in size, to make a big pile at the edge of the woods. With my friends, I'd run down the hill, launch myself into the pile, to be enveloped in its crisp embrace. My walk to school was essentially a nature walk, through woods, down a mix of narrow paved and unpaved roads. One maple tree had particularly bright leaves with orange, yellow and red, to pick up and take to art class.

Now I live in a larger small town, a Little Big Town (like the Dustin Hoffman movie Little Big Man), on a busy street, and though I cannot stem the odd and hazardous tradition of piling leaves in the way of cars, bicyclists and pedestrians, or the stampede of traffic spilling gases into the air, I can toss leaves into a leaf corral, in what seems to me a more sustaining and spiritual approach to the physical world. The leaf corrals are an experiment in no-work, no carbon footprint composting. This fall, the corrals' contents, decomposing passively all summer, were inspected to see the results. This particular corral--called a Wishing the Earth Well because it's a well that works in reverse, giving nutrients back to the earth--includes a central cylinder made of critter-proof hardware cloth, where food scraps can be thrown and allowed to decompose, surrounded and disguised by a donut-shaped column of leaves. Yield of this 3 foot diameter corral was one and a half big tubs of compost, and a retrieved teaspoon from the kitchen that somehow got mixed in with the food scraps. There was also an effort to grow potatoes and nasturiums, which showed some promise. A botanist, by the way, will watch a movie like Young Frankenstein and come away wondering what Gene Wilder meant when he said "Never be nasty to nasturiums." Was he speaking metaphorically, or was it just something that needed to be said?

A larger corral, six feet wide and called the OK Leaf Corral, yielded five big tubs of compost ready for incorporation into the garden beds.

Here's a closeup of the compost, soft and spongy, dark and rich. Ah, the rewards of all that non-labor and non-burning of fossil fuels.

A neighbor who tried this leaf corral approach said his leaves didn't decompose, which probably meant they were dry. I, too, noticed in midsummer some pockets of undecomposed leaves in the piles, and came up with a novel approach to improving decomposition without having to turn the pile. This root feeder, normally used for fertilizing trees, can inject water into the leaf pile while also making channels for rainwater to penetrate. A few minutes of poking around was all it took to get the interior of the pile moist, and enable the decomposition of the red oak leaves by end of summer. Moisture, along with all the decomposing fungi, bacteria and insects, also enter from the ground beneath the pile.

Here's the prettiest leaf corral, which you'll have to take my word for because it's completely disguised by a dogwood tree. In other words, leaf corrals can blend into the yard, disguised by foliage while they quietly work their decomposing magic. A nice surprise last fall and winter was how the leaves would quickly settle in the corrals, after just a few days, allowing more leaves to be added as the trees slowly let them go. A leaf corral performs, then, as a bottomless receptacle for leaves.

In its simplest form, a leaf corral is made of green wire fencing, 3-4 feet high, with a couple stakes to hold it in place. Some folks in town have asked me to make leaf corrals for them, which I'm happy to do at cost, along with a donation to our Friends of Herrontown Woods.