UPDATE: using bird netting to trap leaves

In an early November post I talked about using bird netting to catch the leaves from our neighbor’s sycamore (a.k.a. London planetree, Platanus × hispanica), preventing them from piling up in the aloes and agaves in our driveway bed. I don’t mind raking leaves that accumulate in the driveway proper, but getting them out of spiny and spiky plants is a tedious and painful chore I want to minimize as much as I can.

Now, six weeks later, I’m happy to report that the netting did exactly what I was hoping it would do.

After a few storms with high winds, our neighbor’s sycamore is almost bare. Not entirely, but what’s left shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Sycamore after dropping most of its leaves

Let’s take a look at the results after removing the netting.

This is the top end of the driveway bed. Leaves have piled up along either side of the bed, but those are easy to rake up.

Leaves on either side...

Just a few leaves ended up in the middle, between plants. Most importantly, none accumulated in the larger aloes, like Aloe aloides:

...but none inside the rosettes of my aloes

The situation is similar at the bottom end of the driveway bed:

Leaves along our driveway

Leaves along our driveway

Leaves on our neighbor’s side

Leaves on our neighbor’s side

Almost no leaves in the middle of the bed and on top of the plants:

Removing leaves from agaves and hechtias can be painful so I’d rather not do it

Hechtia ‘Wildfire’, my favorite hechtia, with just a few small leaves

5 ft. Aloe helenae with just one tiny leaf

Aloe ‘Maui Gem’ (A. mawii × globuligemma) is virtually debris-free – and pushing two inflorescences

As much as I would have liked to save the netting for reuse, there really was no way. The strands are so thin that they got caught on a lot of things, and I had to cut the netting into sections to remove it. I know, throwing it away is not a very eco-friendly thing to do, but I try to be as sustainable as I can in my daily life so I granted myself an exemption in this case.

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