My yard has a quite a bit of bare earth. We haven’t installed irrigation everywhere and have several slopes, so the only thing that grows in many areas are the blown in weed seeds that come up every spring. Mostly these are foxtail grasses, and with two dogs running around, we’ve learned the hard way that these are a health and safety hazard.

We try to pull these up once a season, before they set seed. But there are thousands of them, so we tend to prioritize areas that we know the dogs will go over. The big pull happened earlier in the season. As a side project to cleaning up our junk pile, I decided now is a good time to weed under our grape vines.

My dad planted our vines around twenty years ago, and we basically do nothing for them. Maybe they get water from the neighbor’s irrigation. We don’t fertilize them (or even pick all the grapes), but every year, regular as clockwork we get a whole variety of small green and red grapes. The best I can guess is that these are probably wine making varieties. They get very sweet and often dry to raisins on the vine.

I’ve decided on recycling these because because who wants to haul a bunch of stuff around if you don’t have to? The laziest thing to do is to keep these on site. But I can’t just toss these weeds in my compost bins, because they’ve already set seed. If I add these to my compost, I can’t be sure that the compost will heat up for long enough to kill the seeds. I could end up mixing thousands of weed seeds into my veggie garden. (The horror!)

My plan is to pull the grasses, turn them into fertilizer, and then mulch around the vines with the dried leaves from the previously mentioned junk pile. There’s not much to this. I’m cutting the seed heads off to cut down on the seed load. And I’m cutting the roots off to prevent them from re-rooting. The stems get clipped up with scissors and thrown right back onto the soil.

Like any other plants, grass releases the nutrients it used to grow back into the soil when it rots, so these grass clippings are basically free fertilizer. But it’s important to point out that there’s a limit to how much grass you can use to top dress the soil. The clippings can turn into a soggy mass that blocks air and water from reaching the soil.

Continuing with my theme of lazy gardening recycling, the dried leaves from my junk pile are going right over the grass clippings as mulch.

So much tidier. And no materials were moved more than 8 feet for this project. I love lazy.