All right. I accepted that I could never destroy the brush pile, even one created by the detritus of only seven trees, as quickly as it could generate itself. Not, she muttered darkly, with three-foot snowfalls. The city is picking up branches, but it doesn't say whether the amputations go to the landfill or to mulch. Probably to landfill, because people can bring their own stuff to the city nursery through the end of this month. Over the past two evenings I have extracted the largest, most useful wood and bundled the rest. Whatever I cannot fit in the car at once, I will leave by the dumpster. I admit it.
In 2001, with an eye to do more gardening than just the vegetables, I fetched myself a Cassidy-load of mulch from the TreeCycle mulch giveaway. It was good mulch, and so last year RDC and I borrowed a small pick-up truck and went back for another load. I mulishly insisted on filling the thankfully small truck bed even when I saw that this mulch sucked. There were whole branches of Yule trees, chopped not chipped, there were quantities of needles. That crap has sat in my backyard on a tarp for a year, where it has served to discourage (though not kill) the bindweed under it.
My other unethical measure, then, has been finally to bag up most of this pointless, pointy stuff. I'm going to bring it to the City Nursery as well. But not all of it. I pitchforked through it, sifting the big and most of the little chunks out. I am going to use the needles in a lasagne composting bed I am going to try, these needles plus those from the two branches the evergreen lost in the blizzard.
Two unstoppable forces rule my yard: cherry sprouts and bindweed. I had known that the garage is surrounded on the three non-car sides by a couple of feet of gravel, but I didn't know until I shifted the brush pile away from the garage and clipped the cherry sprouts that have grown up through it that they first were growing through two layers of black plastic as well.
Is it okay that I love my cherry tree but hate its sproutlets?