Gwen, you've certainly got a fight on your hands and I wish you well
reclaiming your yard.!!

My suggestion would be to take a spading fork to the bark chips and "
fluff", turning the chips over, not worrying too much about the leaves.
Bury what you can and let decomposition help out over the gardening season.
IF you still have too many leaves, add some fresh bark on top.

Wherever I use Bark Chips, I'm careful to add a high nitrogen fertilizer in
the early spring and again when the weather warms up.... decomposing bark
can sequester nitrogen from the soil, and lack of nitrogen can slow the
composting at the soil surface.

Sometimes its ok to pick the important battles and let the minor
irritations heal themselves.

Sue
Western Maine

"Gwen Morse" wrote in message
news:1112132202.b989ec03e167782a1b3951b54b09fcbf@t eranews...
On 29 Mar 2005 12:49:48 -0800, wrote:

Why are you bagging it up at all?
Shred it with a mower put it back down and put chips on top.
Your soil will improve.

Long story made short: We're reclaiming land that was taken over by
wrist-thick wisteria vines. The soil is in _lovely_ condition,
however, there's only patchy grass (and much of it is probably crab
grass), because the rest was under thick fallen leaf cover. The vines
were spreading under the leaf cover where we couldn't see them. We
only live on 60x100, so, I think it's still possible to reclaim all
the land from the vines, but, to be sure we have all the runners,
we're stripping the property down to bare dirt/grass.

The bark chips are in my regular planting circles around the house,
and the leaves mixed into them over the winter.

In any case, we couldn't mow the leaves with the bark chips mixed in.
They'd destroy the mower. So, once again, is there a way to separate
the leaves from the bark chips -- shaking them out in my hands isn't
working so well.

Gwen