In one of my all-time favorite books --- Taran Wanderer --- our hero stumbles upon a family which provides for its members by stringing up a big net across a river and then collecting whatever the river provides every day.  The image really struck my fancy when I first read the book in middle school, and now as the leaves begin to catch in clotted masses along the edges of the ford I'm inspired to try my hand at the same thing.

Last night, I captured enough leaves by hand to fill five 5-gallon buckets, then spread them across the tops of my empty garden beds.  Last year, I covered a few beds in this manner and they produced the richest soil which resulted in beautiful onions.  I only covered a few beds, though, because I had to carry the wet leaves by hand a quarter of a mile from the ford to the house.  This year I resolved to collect more.  So after I scooped up the leaves which were already stuck to the ford, I strung up an old seine we had in the barn and left it overnight to steep in creek water.

When I went back to check on my net this afternoon, it was bulging with its heavy load of leaves.  A tiny watersnake was resting in one of the net's folds, but I wasn't fast enough to catch it on film.  Once the snake safely slipped away into the center hole of an old cinderblock, I gathered the seine closed and lifted it into the golf cart, then zipped home to spread the leaves on my garden.  A few crawdads crawled out of the mulch and I fed them to our ever-appreciative chickens.

I really wanted to include a quote from Taran Wanderer here, but unfortunately I read the first part of the series to Mark's cousin when she was in grade school and she liked it so much that she stole the whole compilation from me.  So you'll just have to go look up the book for yourself....  And, if you'd rather read facts about using leaves as mulch, check out You Bet Your Garden's page on the subject.