We have several “tufts” of tall-grass around the edge of our patio. Last year, I tried letting it go au naturel, which is a technical term meaning: I let it be and didn’t tend it at all. I didn’t like that. It looked scraggly pretty much all the time. So this year, I went back to the annual ritual of cutting down the dead stems from last year’s “crop.”
It seemed kind of absurd to me, as I chopped and bagged yesterday, that I was about to pay to have a truck haul this stuff away and then pay another truck to bring some compost to me. That’s an awful lot of gasoline and pollution (and expense) just to get these clippings back into the soil.
I think I have this problem licked. I took 12 feet of hardware wire, made a circle out of it, artfully applied a few cable ties to keep it in shape, and dumped in all five yard waste bags of the tall-grass clippings. I also threw in a couple scoops of organic lawn fertilizer, since these clippings are high in carbon but low in nitrogen. Then I tossed in this morning’s coffee grounds and a couple of sprigs of pine tree (just for flavoring). If it ever stops raining and I can mow, I’ll dump the grass clippings from the first mowing in, too. (The rest of the year, I’ll just mulch the clippings back into the lawn.)
With some judicious “stirring” of the pile, I should have some compost in June or July, without the use of trucks or gasoline.
