And poof! it was gone

We are lucky to have the most beautiful Ginko trees lining the median strip outside our house. They are particularly glorious during Autumn and, more than once this season, I have found myself stopping mid-stride to gaze at them out the window. Back in Australia, when we were setting out plans to improve our moonscape garden, they were top of my wish list and I was devastated to discover that they take an eternity to grow and we would probably not live long enough to see them mature.

All of this just means I have really appreciated living with so many of them outside my bedroom window.

Besides the aesthetic benefits, these trees drop a hell of a lot of leaves. They are a triumphant golden colour and shaped like large maidenhair fern leaves. It's terribly un-Californian of us but we love to get out there with a rake and bin bags to collect the leaves for mulch (the preferred method of leaf disposal here is the bin). Summers are long and hot here, and every gardener needs to do as much as they can to keep their garden in top form. There is very little environmentally friendly stuff you can do when you live in an apartment complex, so doing this small bit of our garden also helps to alleviate the guilt of not being able to compost etc.

This year we collected as much mulch as possible. First putting an extraordinarily thick layer on the gardens, and then storing as much as we could get in bin bags next to our front door. The thought being that by the time the leaves in the garden had time to decompose a little, there would be more room in the garden and we could add more from the bags. It was a terrific plan however sometime over the weekend we were struck by the MULCH THIEF OF MOUNTAIN VIEW. What you see below is the divot created by our bag of mulch. Maybe this means the idea of mulching gardens has taken off, but that people are just too lazy to collect their own?