Suburban Girl Seeks Rural Life: Solving Problems with Problems

My leaf problem:
Dedicated readers may remember that I have a lot of trees and that they love to spill tons of leaves into my yard every fall. Although I do my best to mow frequently, and thus mulch leaves in the process, there are always large piles of leaves gathering on my back porch (which is walled in), against my fence, and in any other nook and cranny they can find. It would probably be best to take care of my leaf issue in the fall, but I tend to like to procrastinate......for years. So those piles of leaves are getting quite large as we move into year 3 in our little rural paradise. My issue was what to do with all those leaves. I know they could fill many, many yard waste bags, as was made evident during one of my half-assed attempts to clean up the back porch last year. I filled up almost ten bags, and my porch isn't even that large. For some reason, my neighbors never put out yard waste bags. They have the added advantage of not having fences, so their leaves blow away (or against my fence). I don't want to be the neighborhood yard waste bag pariah.

My mulch problem:
During our first year in the house, we put down wood mulch in our garden and our flowerbeds to keep weeds away. When it came time to clean and prepare them for planting the next year, we had the fun task of cleaning out and dealing with lovely chunks of wood. We decided to do no wood mulch the following year, but I was too late putting down hay. Weeds were everywhere (as evidenced by earlier posts) and our plants suffered from not having good mulch to retain moisture.

The solution:
During late spring, I stumbled across a pin on Pinterest titled "Mulch Alternatives." It was as if mother nature was smiling down upon me and pointing me in the right direction. One of the more viable options it gave was using leaves. The leaves would have to mulched, though, to let air and moisture get to the soil. My dad had talked about his leaf mulching machine, so I asked to borrow it. One a warm sunny day, I mulched up all the leaves on our back patio and those stuck between our two fenced garden plots. I made a dent in some of the leaves piled against our fence. There is still work to be done and leaves to be mulched, but I have turned two problems into a solution!