Instead of piling or bagging fallen leaves, put them to work in your yard.
by Kathy Sykes
Fall provides a great opportunity to suppress weeds and provide essential nutrients for next year’s yard and garden. But there is no need to spend money on mulch and fertilizer. Mother Nature is providing both.
Fallen leaves are a free resource with many benefits. They create an organic layer, providing not only food and shelter but also nesting and bedding materials for wildlife and winter protection for beneficial insects. The leaves are an important component to a home compost pile and can be layered between your food waste throughout the winter. And, they feed and shelter numerous microbes, which are probably the most important “crop” you can grow. All plant life depends on healthy soil, and microbes in the soil provide the essential nutrients for next year’s grass.
Raking removes important nutrients from your lawn, but if you decide you need a “tidier” look, you could rake the leaves into garden beds, flower beds, or around bushes or trees. You can also offer the leaves to your neighbors.
Fall leaves act as mulch and fertilizer, and they’re free.
The leaves aren’t the only plant matter we can leave in place through winter. The stems of hollow and pithy plants – milkweed, Joe Pye weed, sunflowers, goldenrod, bee balm, mountain mint and ironweed – provide winter habitat for our native bees and other insects.
This advice also applies to those of us living in apartments, coops or condos, where decisions on how to care for the landscape are usually made by the management company, a landscape committee or board of directors. They – and hired contractors – might not be aware of the important cost savings or the environmental benefits of leaving the leaves where they fall. In those cases, residents may need to weigh in and educate those in charge of landscaping decision-making.
This is a Forest Hills Connection rerun. The original article was published in 2021.
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John Burwell says
Thanks for the good advice Kathy,
Fall leaves are a resource. I put some leaves in my compost bin, but most I place around newly planted trees as mulch, keeping roots from drying out and keeping weeds and vines from overtaking tender saplings come spring.
Another suggestion is to mow the recently fallen leaves on your lawn. They’ll break down quicker while providing habitat for insects, wildlife and nutrients for the soil.