I'm a Leaf Mulch Farmer and This is My Farm

My darling sunk-cost fallacy

You probably don’t think of me as a leaf mulch farmer. I don’t want that. I want you to think of me as someone who takes leaf mulch very seriously, who makes leaf mulch, who owns a leaf mulch farm.

My name is Stephanie. This is the story of my mulch farm.

My farm is in my yard. The acreage of my farm is 12’ x 8’, which I dutifully measured for this story. This is beyond massive for an ant farm, but shrimpy for a human farm. This averages out to a reasonably sized farm. I love math.

I became a leaf mulch farmer after my neighbor got a pile of leaf mulch last spring. From my driveway, I could detect his was a new kind of mulch. It looked extravagant somehow, if you can say that about mulch. I went over and got the skinny on this unfamiliar compost. It turned out this fancy-looking pile was leaf mulch. It can improve soil much better than wood mulch can. I was smitten.

The one tiny problem with this nutritious mulch is that it’s more expensive than wood mulch. I was born with an F1CHEAP gene, otherwise known as the frugal gene. This meant the swanky leaf mulch suddenly wasn’t looking so good.

Then it dawned on me. What if I made my own leaf mulch? How hard could that be? The one undeniable feature of my yard is its endless supply of FREE leaves. The word ‘free’ should sound like a Vivaldi symphony here.

I got straight to work researching how one mulches leaves. I wanted to make a big pile I could use for mulching different spots in my yard.

I bought an inexpensive leaf mulcher machine and set up my farm. This consisted of pounding a bunch of rusty garden stakes into a U-shape and wrapping it in old garden mesh I had laying around. This would be my holding pen for the mulch — my version of a grain silo.

All I had to do was wait for the earth to get to a certain spot around its orbit of the sun, and the temps to drop, and the leaves would break loose of their branches and twirl down. Harvest season!

At first, I was psyched. “This is going to be so awesome,” I said. And at first, it was. However, in no time I then said, “Uh-oh. This is not so awesome.”

The problem was the time it took to make what turned out to be a dinky hump of leaf mulch. I’d gather the leaves, feed them into the mulcher by the handful, dump the bag of mulch in the silo, then set everything up again. This doesn’t include how often I’d need to replace the plastic strings that do the shredding. They die a quick death, but to re-thread them into the machine is ever so slow.

The cost in time was quickly blaring its foghorn at me — this is not worth it, Miss Mulch Farmer!

Which leads me to the real story here — I refused to give up. My stubbornness prevailed through the rest of the Fall and Winter as I kept bleeding time for a very small return.

I refused to bail on the idea because of my robust sunk-cost leaf mulch fallacy. Meaning, I felt I’d sunk too much into this project to lose my investment.

Keep in mind, I wasn’t building a house or renovating one. I wasn’t working toward a degree or putting time into a career. I wasn’t spending quality time with my loved ones. I was making leaf mulch! Leaf mulch is not such a highly valuable thing — at least not to me.

Making the decision to bail on something like this — your special project baby — is hard because the entire endeavor is a stand-in for you. It was your cool idea. It was your money spent, or your time, which can be so hard to walk away from.

Sometimes these types of decisions are tricky. We want it both ways — to reap a return on our investment while jumping ship. Sometimes that’s a no-can-do.

What we can do is realize that the current accounting of our situation includes not only our sunk resources but a lesson learned. This kind of letting go builds wisdom — both as knowledge of the courage it takes to change course, and clarity on how to do it again.

For this Spring, I’ll cherish every pitchfork of leaf mulch I lay on the ground. I will feel self-sufficient and self-made. After that, I’ll write it off as a good idea that had its day in the sun — plus a bunch of other days.

And I hope — oh I hope — my plants don’t proliferate and grow like they’ve never grown before. That will be a sneaky voice from the ground telling me, “See? I told you a leaf mulch farm was a good idea.”

If it sounds like a Vivaldi symphony, I’ll put my hands on my ears.