Wealth Grows on Trees

I, Jason, know money doesn't grow on trees, but all the same I felt rich today while raking leaves.

Certainly many folks regard tree leaves as a nuisance, but we treasure them as a resource.  Forest ecologists could probably talk for a year straight about the cascade of life that tumbles around in the leaf litter layer on the forest floor, nearly completely fueled by the breaking of chemical bonds in, primarily, the cellulose and lignin components of spent leaves.  If your eyes can be little enough, you can pull aside the leaves and see the duffy soil teeming with invertebrates, and netted with fungal hyphae and plant roots.

Chickens' eyes are apparently little enough.  While J (who lives in the in-law quarters and works with me usually two days per week) and I raked leaves, it became time to let the chickens from the composting coop out for their daily frolic.  Janelle came and joined us in the raking for a while and we agreed together:  It is such a pleasure to watch chickens in the woods.  This is their most natural environment and they glory in it (assuming chickens can glory at all, which I assume they sort of can).  Anyone who has ever ranged chickens in a manicured yard can attest to the fact that chickens love nothing more than to pull back the mulch from anywhere it has been tidily applied and discover the treats lurking therebeneath.  A forest floor covered in leaves can be thought of as a vast, uninterrupted mulched bed, and sifting through it hour after hour is their favorite pastime, but it is far from idle for them.  Judging from the number of times they stop their scratching and peck fervently at a spot a few times--sometimes with several chickens crowding around the same spot--they are finding serious goodies.

I can attest to that also since I am the feed dispenser around here most days.  If I haven't been home in the evening to let them out for two days running, I find there is a minor but noticeable uptick in feed consumption (Even on those days, however, their feed consumption is less than my other chickens because of what they gather nicking through the composting litter).  I can also attest to the quality of those goodies, since I eat the eggs.  On the pan, the yolks are orange and perky, standing tall and round while frying.  Scrambled, they glow yellow and have a warm, rich flavor.  I can't eat oak or cherry leaves myself, but I can eat the eggs that come from the chickens that eat the bugs that eat the microbes that eat the leaves.  Cha-ching!

We were raking leaves mainly from an area we've never really done anything with before, but which we are wanting to clear of saplings, young trees, and autumn olive shrubs to make way for an access path for bikes, cars, animal range pens, and people on foot to be able to make easier use of the land in the middle of our property.  Ideally, this ground will grow grass on it so that it can withstand repeated compaction without serious soil damage, excessive muddiness, or erosion from wind or water.  As such, leaves in that area are a liability, just like they are for the lawn grass minded homeowners all over the country who are spending precious hours these weeks firing up their leaf blowers and herding all the pesky leaves from their lots onto the curb to await being forcibly ingested en masse by a large vacuum truck driven by municipal employees, then regurgitated onto giant piles, where eventually people like us drive up and fork great mounds of them onto our pickups or utility trailers, take them home and spread them around in our yards.  So.  Where was I?

Oh, yes, so the leaves were a problem where they were, but we had another problem elsewhere.  In places we have mounded soil in long rows on contour with the slope of the land with the idea of retaining water long enough for it to penetrate the soil surface so we can grow more plants and trees, which will make more leaves...I'm getting ahead of myself.  The problem we had was that the soil on these berms, as we call them, was bare, unless you count the hordes and multitudes of baby wild grass and weed plants that have germinated enthusiastically there.  Nature abhors a vacuum, you understand, and I don't mean the kind driven by municipal employees!  If those little weedlets are allowed to grow up, we will either have a tremendous and frustrating weeding job on our hands next spring or we will have lots of unwanted plants in our productive ground once they complete their life cycle and go to seed themselves.  What to do?

Fortunately, fortunately, my friends, we have leaves!  As J and Janelle and I cleared the leaves from where they laid, allowing the life-giving light in to any grass wishing to grow in that space, we loaded them into wheelbarrows and wheeled them merrily up the slope to the berms and distributed them in a six-inch layer over those hordes of weedlets, effectively cutting off their light.  Cha-ching!

Leaves can also provide the carbonaceous foundation for the sanitizing and nutritious litter layer in a composting poultry coop, make an excellent weed-controlling mulch layer (that breaks down into the loveliest and most nourishing organic matter) for tomatoes and other garden plants, and when chopped or partly mouldered make the finest cover material we have yet found for our "humanure" toilets.  Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching!

I said to J as we were raking in the new area that as we begin to open up more of our land to our use, I am going to begin to feel very rich.  The truth is that we are currently using a very small percentage of the eventual available total, and of that part we're using now, only a fraction (if any) is producing at its maximum potential.  If we return to the soil and the forest at least a portion of what we take, I believe we'll see a crescendo of productivity that we can ride like dolphins in the surf.

As I emerged from the woods with the last barrow of leaves to spread on one of the new berms, something caught my eye in my peripheral vision.  I turned my head and nearly caught my breath: The west flank of Massanutten mountain was glowing; billions of oak, maple, poplar, hickory leaves dangling delicately from their twigs shone like gold coins in the evening sun.