Local gardener stays busy during fall

Not one tree leaf goes to waste in the yard of John Cordes. This gardener gathers bags of leaves from his neighbors in the Timberlake area and brings them home to his backyard.

He starts gathering leaves in October each year, and he finishes in December. Last year he took in 407 bags and three truckloads of leaves. So far this year, his total haul is 300 bags.

“People set bags of leaves on the street for collection. If they’re near the road, I pick them up. Nobody has ever complained to me about it,” Cordes explained.

His garden covers the backyard and it is a series of raised beds with walkways in between. Cordes spreads shredded leaves at least a foot deep in the walkways. He said he shreds them “because leaves are going to rot faster if they are in small pieces.”

His leaves break down over the summer. Before adding any new leaves, Cordes shovels the rotted leaves from the walkways to the raised beds and tills them into the soil.

“Most gardeners are busiest in spring. I’m busiest in fall,” confided Cordes. “That’s when I’ve got to empty the walkways and then I’ve got to fill them with leaves again.”

This fall Cordes sent two soil samples to the lab at Virginia Tech for testing and he showed me the reports sent by the lab. He said “these lab reports show that I should never have any blossom end rot on my tomatoes. Calcium levels are very high and I have added no lime in over 10 years.”

Most of his leaves are oak. Although soil acidity is often blamed on oak leaves, Cordes’ lab reports show pH levels of 6.6 and 7. That means there is little or no acidity in his soil.

Cordes described his gardening success since he began planting at this site 17 years ago, “for the first seven years, plants got bigger every year. When I gave tomatoes to people, they wanted to know how I make them so sweet. I think it’s the calcium.”

Cordes and his wife Estelle grow the full range of vegetables with organic fertilizer starting in early spring with Candy onion plants he orders from Texas.

“We can, freeze and give away a lot of what we grow. Boxes full of our canned vegetables, relishes, pickles, juices and jellies were the gifts we gave our family every Christmas,” said Cordes.

Another benefit of Cordes’ leaf gathering is getting a free supply of bags. As he put it, “I haven’t had to buy a garbage bag for years.”

Gardening keeps Cordes active at age 87, and it has been in his blood since childhood. He reflected that “when I was just a kid, I spaded up a plot 10 by 20 feet and planted it. No one told me about weeds and they soon took over.”

You have less than a month to turn in your application for the 2009 Master Gardener program. Applications for the program are due on January 9 and they are available from the Lynchburg Extension Office at 455-3740 or on the Hill City Master Gardener Association’s website at www.hcmga.com.