Yard Waste Re-Used

In addition to about 30 citrus trees, we have nine large pine trees on our property.  The pine trees provide great shade, but they also drop a lot of pine needles. For years we used to spend hours raking them up and almost as long stuffing them into 40-gallon trash bags to be thrown away. It wasn’t a fun job trying to bag pine needles, they poke you and scratch you and get stuck in places that really hurt—even if you wear gloves.

Then we started to get a little smarter. We used some of them in our compost pile. It worked okay, but the pine needles tended to mat together and didn’t break down as fast as other yard waste. We tried chopping them up with a shovel, but that didn’t work well.

After looking at some gardening books, Steve came up with the idea of using the pine needles as material to create walking paths. As we walk on the pine needles they break down and later can be thrown in the compost where they disintegrate faster. They look nice, smell good and cushion our feet as we walk.

We put pine needles around our garden beds. We hardly ever have any weeds there.		The pine needle path leading from our garden, through part of our orchard to our back yard grass area.

We no longer bag any of our pine needles and they don’t end up in land fills either. They line our property in various places and make great acidic amendments for clay soil.

We'd love to hear how you re-use your yard waste—just post a comment to help us all out.