Last week I mentioned cleaning up all the leaf litter left behind from the gypsy moth caterpillars. My woods was not only filled with this leaf litter, but also the leaves from years gone by. Whoever rakes a woods? Well I did because the leaves that were there were acting just like a weed barrier and I decided to use them in a new flowerbed that I am making. I tried this last year with a new bed I made in the front yard and it worked great. An approximately three inch thick layer of leaf debris worked well to prevent weed growth. I put down the leaves and then put mulch on top of them to compress them down and add aesthetic beauty. Normally, I would landscape fabric under my mulch, but because I don’t know exactly what I am going to plant here right now, using the leaves makes more sense. As the leaves breakdown, they give back vital nutrients to the soil. Earthworms are attracted to the decaying leaves and the worms are beneficial to whatever plants I decide to put in the bed. And when I do finalize the bed, I can just rake back the mulch and put the landscape fabric directly over the leaf debris. For those of you that don’t have piles of leaves in your backyard, newspaper will work in the same way. These days most newspapers use biodegradable soy ink that won’t harm the environment and it can be laid down the same way as the leaf debris. The paper will break down over time, but if you are using it in a flowerbed that you change every spring, it is a good way to recycle and control weeds on a short term basis. Landscape fabric is still the best weed control if you are doing a landscape project that is set in stone. Good landscape fabric can last ten to fifteen years under your mulch before it starts to break down and unlike black plastic, fabric allows water and nutrients to pass down to your plant’s roots. But since I don’t have any plans set in stone, I decided that the leaf litter was the way to go. It may take me a couple of years to really decide what I want to put in since my deer have limited my selections. I have found that the coyote urine that worked so well as a deer repellent for me when I lived in Swan Lake, does nothing to keep the deer away in Eldred. The reason being is that we have plenty of coyote roaming in the woods around Eldred so smelling traces of coyote is a daily occurrence for the deer. Dried blood works well, but it can’t be used often as it is a natural nitrogen fertilizer and if it used too often in the garden or flowerbed will lead to a nitrogen imbalance, whereby the plants will grow great but not fruit or flower very often. Nitrogen is great for keeping your plants green but it is phosphorus that gets plants to fruit or flower and your plants want more phosphorus than nitrogen in the soil. So be careful if using dried blood as a deer repellent. But I digress from talking about the flowerbed. The reason I don’t know what I am going to plant has many factors. The deer is one, but sunlight is another. I have been cutting down many small pine trees that were growing around my house. Most were only around twenty to twenty five feet tall and very spindly and I wanted to open up my wooded area a little bit. If I can increase the hours of sunlight hitting the ground to around four hours, most plants including ones that say they like “full sun” will do just fine in the area. So my bed is a work in progress and that is okay. When working in the yard it is fine not to have all the answers, and I can’t have all the answers because I don’t know all the questions yet. But that is what is fun about working out in the yard when you don’t have a specific job to get done. As I look around my yard I see a lot of projects for the coming years to keep me very busy in retirement.