Urban Ecoist

Seems quite a lot…if used as mulch.

I ran across this little item in the American Society for Horticultural Sciences, and though I had to actually say out some of the sentences as they read like gobbledygook in my brain — all those weights, orange fruit weights, average weights and percentage of orange fruits, I think. Basically, a study found that applying leaves (in this case, municipal leaves) to pumpkin patches as mulch improved the pumpkin patch.

And you wonder where universities spend their money?

So some people from Rutgers University laid out four test plots where pumpkins were planted. Two of the plots had city leaves applied as mulch. The other two plots went with the old bare soil with the added treatment of herbicide. One of the mulched plots and one of the bare soil plots were given side dressings of 25 pounds per acre of Nitrogen as fertilizer. The other two had three-times the amount of fertilizer, but again, one had mulch, one bare soil/herbicide.

Over two years, definite differences were detected by the second growing season.

In 2006, there were no differences in total number of fruit, number of orange fruit, and percentage of orange fruit at harvest between production systems. Total weight, weight of orange fruit, and average fruit weight of pumpkin fruit was significantly higher and similar at both sidedress N rates in both leaf mulch production systems compared with bare soil…Applying municipal leaves to the soil surface exhibited a marked advantage over bare soil in producing clean fruit. In both years, the percentage of clean fruit at harvest was higher in both leaf mulch production systems compared with bare soil. –HortTech

See what I mean…gobbledygook in the brain voice.

Personally, I’d want to further expand on the experiment and try different mulches, but I understand the point of using urban leaves to see if it could be a win-win situation for pumpkin farmers in outlying areas and for city-dwellers. In many parts of this country, the autumn rain of leaves from city trees can be a tremendous amount of leaf debris to find a home for. Leaves take quite a while to decompose, especially when in such large amounts, and if a city does not have a large commercial scale composting facility at its, ahem, disposal (sorry), then that city needs to come up with some creative methods of getting rid of all those leaves.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the problem of urban leaf litter picking up not-so-nice stuff that leak from cars. The study didn’t mention it, but sure, in a perfect world, municipal leaves would not touch the roadway and cars wouldn’t leak coolant and oil and transmission and brake fluids. How can a city ever guarantee that the leaves would be clean?

Maybe I should apply to the Rutgers Horticulture program…

city, leaves, autumn, study, mulch, pumpkin, disposal, compost, decompose, leaf litter, farmers, herbicide, Rutgers, American Society of Horticultural Sciences