Free garden stakes and mulch (well almost free)

Here in northern New England we had a cool but wonderful June weekend. As many homeowners’ know, the work associated with the upkeep of a house and yard seems to be never ending. Well, my wife and I decided on tackling the never-ending task of trimming back our front tree line that is between our house and the street. This part of the property is about 100 feet long and has a beautiful New England rock wall in the center of it (when you can see it). The trouble is that the trees and undergrowth take this over in about one year if we don’t keep it trimmed back. Although this is usually about a 2 or 3 day task to get trimmed back, it is an excellent source of garden stakes and mulch. From our work this weekend we were able to prune and clear about ¼ of one side of this, and in doing so ended up with a significant pile of brush. Well, instead of packing all of this up into garbage bags and taking it out to the dump, we turned it all (100 % of it), into something we could use. We took the bigger trees and branches and cut them up into 5 or 6 foot sections to be used as garden stakes and fence poles. We were even able to save a couple of the taller young saplings to be used for a natural grape trellis we are building in the back yard. The rest of the brush got chipped up in the chipper/shredder (burning some fuel sorry to say) resulting in 4 wheel-barrels full of wonderful mulch. The mulch was easily spread on all the garden beds to help with water retention and keep the weeds down. It felt really good to be able sit back after we were done with the big brush pile and realize that all of it went to something we could use, and none of it ended up going to a landfill or being burned.

So, next time you are out doing yard work that produces some yard waste, think about any way that you can turn it into something that you can use. Then again, this is life according to Troy.