Fall maintenance is not just a way to ensure your landscape stays beautiful in a new season—it also protects your investment and keeps your landscape healthy all year long. Without pruning, mulching and fertilizing your landscape during the critical autumn season, a once-beautiful investment may become lackluster in the spring. But once you take the necessary steps to maintain your landscape, another seemingly daunting issue arises: what to do with all that landscape waste.
Below are the simple dos and do nots of what to do with your yard waste.
Do Not Toss Your Landscape Waste in the Garbage
Although it may not necessarily be illegal to throw away your yard waste, you will be missing out on all of the beneficial properties of reusing the clippings from a long day of landscape maintenance.
Do Consider Composting Your Yard Waste
If you do not already have a bin for your food scraps, autumn is the perfect time to begin building a catch-all receptacle for landscape waste. Although hardier branches may take too long to break down, grass clippings, fallen leaves and pruning waste are perfect candidates for a compost bin that will provide valuable nutrients for your landscape over time. Additionally, some community gardens offer drop-off compost collection.
Do Not Burn Your Yard Waste
In Colorado’s dry climate, burning stacks of loose clippings create an uncontrolled fire with the ability to be picked up by the wind—resulting in disastrous consequences if not contained. Logs and thick branches may be burned depending on your local fire regulations and community bylaws, or dried and reused into stunning seasonal decor.
Do Mulch Your Leaves Instead of Bagging Them
Fallen leaves are not just a sure sign of autumn, but an opportunity to reuse the leaves as an eco-friendly fertilizer. With a mulching lawnmower, fallen leaves are shredded into a confetti-like size, allowing the scraps to fall between the blades of grass and boost the nutrients of the lawn naturally.
Do Not Let Fall Decor Go to the Landfill
Most autumn-inspired decor—think pumpkins, corn stalks and floral wreaths—are compostable when clipped down to a biodegradable size. When composting pumpkins or decorative gourds, make sure to remove all seeds beforehand. Otherwise, you may end up with a miniature pumpkin patch where your compost bin once was.
Do Enlist the Help of Property Care Experts
Instead of guessing what lawn clippings can be composted, burned or hauled off to a waste facility, leave the entire affair to an all-inclusive landscape design company such as Lifescape.
Are you ready to make the most of your landscape waste? Contact us at Lifescape Colorado to get the conversation started and learn how we can help you to give your lifescape waste another life.