Make the question in the title of this announcement into a statement and I would 100% agree with it.
Gardening organically using permaculture techniques and using nature to do most of your work for you gives you fruit and vegetables that not only taste better than commercially grown, industrial food crops but, the environmental impact on each persons local community is much, much less.
Here is an idea for people to think about: instead of exporting all of the so called weeds and fallen leaves that "litter" your yard. Use them as free fertilizer to build healthy soil and grow delicious food in your own yard and if you live in an apartment you can do this on your roof of on your balcony.
The amount of fossil fules used each year to cart all of these "yard wastes" away to land fills or what have you each year is staggering. Not to mention the amount of money spent on salt based: chemical fertilizers that do not replace the nutrients that are taken by plants and only feed the plant directly.
The result is nutrient depleted: clay or sand based soils that cannot support life. Also, with salt based fertilizers; the addition of salts to soil kills local soil flora and fauna that keep pathogens at bay. Therefore, we are breeding disease while using all of these synthetic chemicals to keep our yards looking nice.
Boy, do I sound like a preacher.
Well, here's the solution: In the fall when all the leaves fall off the trees: leave them on the ground, rake them off your lawn and pile them up to use as mulch in the spring. Spread grass clippings directly over your existing beds. No need to put them into a compost pile because spreading them with mulched up leaves over your beds your plants (both edible and inedible will grow better than you have ever seen).
In fact, even you lawn will grow better than you have ever seen because the resultant water insoluble nutrients will be carried from your beds (by winter rains) into your lawn.
Also, you can spread sifted compost directly ontop of your lawns. It's amazing how well they will grow.
Also, for those people with a vegetable garden. At the end of the season when you are pulling the remnant plants (like corn stalks and what have you) out of the soil. You don't need to put everything into the compost pile, you can simply cut everything up right in place.
Corn and tomatoes are vorcious feeders on soil nutrients and if you remove these plants, you remove the nutrients from that particular area. In nature, these plants would decay in the place that they grew, thereby adding the nutrients that they removed from the soil plus the newly fixed carbon to the soil. Using garden clippers to chop plants up will quicken the addition of all of these beneficial nutrients to the soil.
Best of all, everything I have mentioned above a) doesn't cost us a single penny
AND
b) it's not only healthy to be outside getting exercise but, many studies have shown that working in the garden and with nature increases mental health.
In fact, many prisons in Canada have gardens that inmates work in as a part of there rehabilitation therapy. And I have a colleague who has built a Japanese Garden at a local hospital for the healing properties that the garden has for patients who can now strole through the garden. (Imagine who lovely it would be if they could get there hands into the soil as well
)
I said it tasted good and actually tasted like I remember asparagus tasting many years ago.
