Re: Cutting down *all* the trees in your yard
Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2021 6:07 am
Satan.
But, seriously, This sort of emphasis on ’leaf litter’ seems odd to me. When we lived in Phoenix, we couldn’t understand why folks generally didn’t plant trees in a place where unshaded temperatures ran above 100 degrees half of the year, and where parked, unshaded cars could literally get hot enough to have the steering wheel or seat material cause physical burns when you first get in one that has been left exposed to full sun.
Many desert trees don’t even have leaves large enough to be noticed when they fall, settling between the granite that covers most yards. And if you pick carefully, they require virtually no maintenance.
We once had an opportunity to buy a newly-constructed home near South Mountain, and in planning the yard, placed a slew of palo verde trees. Their airy, green form is gorgeous enough, and their open branching cools the house down a bit while letting dappled sun and shade to dance across the yard ... but in springtime they explode with thousands of small yellow flowers, which - when they drop - cover the ground with a golden carpet. It was an amazingly colorful harbinger of the season, but would freak out some neighbors who were horrified with our nonchalance over the prospect of having to do anything to a yard more time consuming than looking at crushed rock bake in the sun. For us, we’d use a blower under the trees a couple of times in spring, and be done with the maintenance. It was the smallest possible price to pay for the beauty of that bloom.
Here in Utah, we bought a house that had an aspen in the front yard up until a few years prior to our purchase. Over the first summer, little shoots kept popping up in the lawn. In year two, and out of admiration for their pluck and the determination shown by the roots of a tree that hadn’t existed above ground for several years, we decided to let them grow. They’re creating an attractive baby grove in one area. Plenty of folks consider aspen to be ‘weed trees’ and they have survivability issues around our altitude and below, but ever since my first time walking through a grove of them some years ago on a hike in the California Sierras and hearing their leaves ‘talk’ in the breeze, I’ve been in love with them, and I’m so happy to have them in the yard.
As for ‘leaf litter’ - we run a mower across them in fall and munch up everything that our aspens or the maple drop. It returns the nutrients taken up by the tree back into the earth, and uses no bags or additional time (we don’t bag grass either; just let it mulch back into the lawn. So easy! We never had grass in Phoenix, only native flora, so we’re determined to let our lawn here be an asset where it is, and not a time suck).
We’ve even taken some of the neighbors leaves off of their hands and into our yard ... creating a big pile for the kids to run and jump through ... and then mowing it right into the lawn afterwards. : )