How Much Biomass Waste Does Your Garden Produce Weekly

[palmaddict]

Living in South San Diego my garden is about an acre with half planted tropical and the remainder a dry garden that gets water every couple of weeks. I am stunned how much plant debris I remove on a weekly basis. I have two "green" 96 gallon trash cans and one "brown" 96 gallon trash cans. On a typical week during the summer it is not unusual for all three cans to be completely full. I have pickup each friday. The green cans are for green waste that can be shredded, watered and recycled into compost at the landfill. As Matty has pointed out there is simply not enough rain here for homeowners to effectively recycle much of their waste (7 inches last year). The brown can is for trash and fiberous palm fronds are requested to be thrown away as trash and they are buried in our landfill. The shredding machine for green waste at the landfill.cannot deal with the fiber content of the fronds.

I fill the three cans each week. The palm fronds and boots go into the trash can and grass clippings and anything soft tissue goes into the green cans. It just amazes me that my garden produces this much material and I leave as much in the garden as possible if I know it will break down. So I let all the seeds fall where they might and most leaves from the trees that I have remain. Still my neighbors are stunned like I am, with just how much material the garden can produce in a single week.

Finally, there is about two times a year when I perform major trimming where it is inefficient to try and put all this waste in 96 gallon cans. On these occasions I convert my truck into a Sanford and Sons (if you remember the show) truck and pile the debris 10 feet high and then I am off to the dump.

At times it is exhausting trying to keep up with the material produced and I need to hire someone to work two full days a month in my yard. Seeing all this debris certainly indicates why tropical jungles are so important to our environment as no where else to you see the ability to fix carbon dioxide at the rates you see in this type of garden.

Once our landfill has composted the waste it is free for the pickup or they will load it into your truck for $6 a yard. It is really quality material and it is tested each week for pesticides and other chemicals. So how much waste does your yard produce and what do you do with it??

Patrick

[MattyB]

Yeah, now that I'm in year 6 of my garden, I'm really starting to get a lot of green waste. Luckily my property is big enough that I have 3 piles of fronds and branches that I use to let them decompose. I've found that taking a little extra time and cutting the branches and fronds into smaller pieces helps to keep the piles lower. Then about once a year I get on top and jump up and down and I can hear the older lower stuff crunch and break and compact down. I have a special pile for Phoenix fronds that I hide in the gully under the pepper tree grove.

[DALION]

I wish to have enough palm fronds to someday call it "MASS" not just leaves.

[Palm crazy]

Sounds like you need a home chipper to take care of all that extra waste. You could make your own mulch out of it.

Only the weeds go into the recycle bin here. Your lucky you have weekly p/u.

[Mauna Kea Cloudforest]

I do about 5-6 truck dump runs a year and the can easily fills up every week. 2/3 of an acre will produce a rather large flow of biomass, especially when 90% of it is covered by relatively dense jungle.

I also deal with steady soil flow on the hillside. Enough debris and organics accumulate that I end up needing to pull soil off the hillside.

[_Keith]

I am biomass negative going out. We compost 100% and I actually pick up over 200 bags of oak leaves from the side of the road to bring into the garden each spring.

[DoomsDave]

Get yourself a shredder. I did, and it's great. Get the biggest one you can (10 HP or bigger) and get the kind that has "food processor" type blades, and not a drum with spikes.

Mine shreds everything, except the very biggest Caryota and Dypsis fronds, and, once sharpened, gets them too. It gets full-blown Roystoneas, varoom!

That said, these are not nice, neat shreds, but great to bury in the Clay of Doom. The dead feed the living.

If you have a fireplace, palm leaves make great kindling and ash. (Don't worry about PH. It takes tons of ash to raise the pH much.)

[Jerry@TreeZoo]

I am able to compost most of my debris. I chop up the little stuff with hand cutters, if it is too big to cut, I sometimes just use a saw and make little logs that I bury in the cut up stuff. Really big stuff or thorny stuff I put out for the bulk truck to pick up. Sometimes I cut up mini logs for my grill.

When I put stuff out for the bulk pick up, it is very coarse and takes up a lot of room, not dense at all. Maybe 2 or 3 yards a month. If that were chipped up it would amount only 2 or 3 yards a year.

Not my pick up but this is what it looks like.

[KennyRE317]

I wish to have enough palm fronds to someday call it "MASS" not just leaves.

Yup, me too

[Jim in Los Altos]

Two 96 gallon green waste containers every week during the growing season and I'm on less than a quarter acre and I compost all the small stuff. My local garbage/recycling company does not discourage palm fronds in the green waste containers. They even want all kitchen waste in there including discarded meat, paper towels, etc. Anything compostible is OK. I had enough Archontophoenix fronds fall off this week to fill one 96 gallon container and I cut the up into small pieces first. The rest was banana, heliconia, brugmansia, and Trachycarpus leaves and a little bamboo.

[Jonathan]

I am biomass negative going out. We compost 100% and I actually pick up over 200 bags of oak leaves from the side of the road to bring into the garden each spring.

Same here...I encourage my neighbours to drop their green waste at our place for use as mulch.

We've got acres of sand to cover, so it's still never enough!

Looks messy in the short term maybe but hopefully will pay off in the long run with improved soil structure (couldnt be much worse than it is!).

I've always liked the slightly untidy nature of forest floors so having leaf litter and branches lying around doesn't worry me at all.

Cheers,

Jonathan

[Gonzer]

Yeah, now that I'm in year 6 of my garden, I'm really starting to get a lot of green waste. Luckily my property is big enough that I have 3 piles of fronds and branches that I use to let them decompose. I've found that taking a little extra time and cutting the branches and fronds into smaller pieces helps to keep the piles lower. Then about once a year I get on top and jump up and down and I can hear the older lower stuff crunch and break and compact down. I have a special pile for Phoenix fronds that I hide in the gully under the pepper tree grove.

Yeah, I can see it now. Along with one of his king-sized gophers.

[Jeff Searle]

We have bulk pick up every other Tuesday. When all said and done, there's probably on average 5-10 yards of trimmings I put out. I try to throw smaller palm leaves along my fence line underneath the Caryota mitis hedge when possible. But I'm on 2 acres and for those of you that have been to my house, you'll know I have a lot of maintance week in and week out.

[Walt]

On my 5.60 acre spread, tree litter is hands down my biggest maintenance item. The litter comprises mostly slash pine needles and cones, followed by leaves, dead (fallen) twigs, branches, exfoliating bark et. al. debris I then add to that wild muscadine grape vines and other undesirable vines.

At least once a week I use my pull-behind-lawn tractor lawn sweeper to get up the pine needles, cones, small litter, etc. Each hopper full weighs differently, depending on what I'm sweeping up and if it is wet or dry. What I can't access with my sweeper must be raked up by hand.

I can't put an exact number on how much yard waste (also counting palm trimming), in terms of pounds per year produced, but it's in the tons.

I have so much yard waste I burn it. I generally burn one big pile, then letting it cool for 2-3 days, and start another burn pile adjacent to the first pile. All ash is recycled as a light fertilizer and lime equivalent. I distribute the ash over the root area of palms and shrubs. Since my soil is very acid, the ash helps bring up the pH.

The north side of my property backs up to state conservatory property. Over the years I've built a wall of dead vegetative debris (stuff too wet to burn) to act like a fence. This wall is covered over with wild muscadine grape vines.

When I got hit by Hurricane Jeanne, I think back in 2005, my property got lots of tree damage. I put out 65 full pick up truck loads of debris to be picked up by the county -- and probably burned that much more.

[DoomsDave]

I wish to have enough palm fronds to someday call it "MASS" not just leaves.

Yup, me too

Like the song, says:

"Someday soon . . . . "

Sooner than you think.

Adding a new verse:

"Up the wazoo

"Generating green waste

"Up the wazooo. . . . "

[redant]

I am able to compost most of my debris. I chop up the little stuff with hand cutters, if it is too big to cut, I sometimes just use a saw and make little logs that I bury in the cut up stuff. Really big stuff or thorny stuff I put out for the bulk truck to pick up. Sometimes I cut up mini logs for my grill.

When I put stuff out for the bulk pick up, it is very coarse and takes up a lot of room, not dense at all. Maybe 2 or 3 yards a month. If that were chipped up it would amount only 2 or 3 yards a year.

Not my pick up but this is what it looks like.

Two of those had to come to my place today to pick up about 4 weeks of fronds and seed stalks and that's very typical of my summer load. Trash cans are useless for my vegetation.