We live in an area with very alkaline, clay soil. It’s not exactly the fertile crescent around here. We don’t use chemical fertilizers on our yard or garden – we rely on the compost we create both in our outdoor bins and our worm bins, and that works really well. But anything we can do to make our soil a bit less alkaline will help the plants uptake the nutrients better. Turns out evergreen trees are very acidic. So we recycled our Christmas tree today.
My husband took it outside, shook off most of the needles into the grass, and then “attacked it with the lawn mower” (his words). All that’s left is the main trunk of the tree. The rest of it is in tiny pieces all over our lawn. Now we just need a good heavy snow to help it soak in.
Free soil boosting, combined with an easy way to get rid of the Christmas tree. I think my husband has been eyeballing the tree ever since the day we put it up, just waiting for the day he could make mincemeat of it and add it to our yard. He also mowed several bags of leaves into the yard so that they can compost down over the winter. Our neighbors bagged their leaves around Thanksgiving and put them out with the trash. My husband couldn’t bear the thought of valuable leaf compost going into a landfill, so he snagged the leaves and stored them until we had a nice day. Now they’re mulched into our grass along with the Christmas tree.
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I love it! Great idea and very useful information…reuse and recycle at it’s best.