Capture Clippings For Free Fertilizer

By Phran Novelli

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - The 'last grass mowing of the season' often includes a lot of leaves. That makes it a perfect time to use a catch-bag on your mower to grab all those leaves and grass clippings and create your own perfect pile of free fertilizer for next year.

Get a friend, or coerce a kid you know into helping you, one of you mows and dumps the bag of gathered grass and leaves into a wheelbarrow while the other whisks that off to a corner of the yard and comes back to get the next bag. If you tag-team the task, it's sort of a fun race - whereas it's incredibly tedious to do on your own.

Mixing those brown autumn leaves with green grass clippings helps everything breaks down faster into that fabulous fertilizer, mulch and top dressing for your trees, shrubs, lawn, and soil amendment for planting in pots or in the ground.

So go mow and catch the grass and leaves in a bag. Promise someone a pizza to help - a prize at the end of the last mow.