My Garden at Rest

So as you can imagine, since it is Fall, the leaves are falling. Obvious statement, right. Well, what most of us don't realize is that the very leaves that fall from our trees are packed full of nutrients for our yards. Just look at the forests in the US. The soil under that canape of trees is some of the richest soil anywhere. Why, because of all the organic matter that is produced and not removed. I'm not saying that we should never rake our leaves or clean them out of the road. If we did that, we would have a lot of upset neighbors. What I am saying is that why not use them to dress our gardens. I did this last year with some success. The problem I ran into was that I did not shred my leaves fine enough, so they didn't break down nearly as fast as I wanted. Last year, I used my leaf blower (I don't know why they call them this since I was not blowing but sucking the leafs), and it didn't shred the leafs well enough. This year I mowed them...twice! And they got really fine. So I am expecting them to break down much faster. A couple of days ago, my next-door-neighbor wanted to be really nice and mow up all of our leaves. He DIDN'T get far. I ran outside and asked him not to mow them, so that I could...I wanted to keep them... As you can imagine, he just gave me this funny look, and said "okay". So here we are. I want to expand my veggie garden, so I will be doing something similar to Lasagna Gardening, developed by Patricia Lanza. We will see how I do. In the garden now is a lone Arugula plant and some Broccoli plants. so my garden is not at complete rest!