Enjoying nature can happen in your own backyard. You aren’t always able to get to a national park or a public lake on a busy Wednesday with a job, laundry list of chores, and children needing attention. However, even a peaceful 15 minutes of silence on your back porch or patio can bring some peace and calmness to the otherwise chaotic world we live in nowadays.
But we tend to even bring our task-oriented world to our backyard sometimes. For example, have you ever wanted to sit and listen to the birds chirp on a cool September morning, but as soon as you step outside realize your yard is polluted with fallen leaves? Naturally, your instinct is to pick them up and keep your space neat and tidy. However, that’s actually the wrong thing to do. Let’s talk about why, so you can spend more time enjoying nature and less time crossing things off your to-do list.
Leaves create a natural mulch in a bed or the ground
There are many microorganisms that feed on fallen leaves. The decaying matter can be extremely important for nourishing life that will bloom again in the Spring. So while your flower bed may “look” better without the leaves, it’s actually much healthier to allow the leaves to sit and deteriorate naturally over winter. This will provide nutrients that your spring flowers will thrive off in the coming year without using chemical fertilizers – both expensive and harmful overtime as they won’t continually repopulate your soil with nutrients like decaying leaves will.
But even in your yard, small animals love to use the decaying leaves for food sources. Lizards, insects, birds, and many other small creatures love the leaves and don’t want you to sweep them away just to show off your clean grass underneath. And having smaller creatures amongst your leaves is better for the entire ecosystem – as it provides hunting opportunities for predatory species. Personally, watching all kinds of wildlife is my favorite thing to do from my back porch – and keeping your leaves on the ground is a great way to attract them!
Mow them into your grass for compost
Assuming you just can’t stand to look at fallen leaves or don’t like other issues that come with them like potential pests – then a great alternative that keeps the nutrients in your lawn is to mow or mulch them where they sit. All mowers work basically the same way – spinning blades chop up anything that reaches a certain height underneath them. To make sure you’ll mulching up all the leaves, you just have to set your blade to that height.
If you have a lawn-mower with a bagger attachment you can also collect the mulched leaves to place yourself in a garden bed or specific areas of your yard that need nutrients.
This is way easier than raking all the leaves in your yard into piles or to the curb for your local cleanup crew to take to the landfill. Plus, it’s healthy for your yard! You’ll increase the rate that leaves break down naturally and greatly help fertilizing your yard through winter. By the time spring rolls around, you’ll have bright green grass feeding on all that leftover leaf matter that just magically disappeared!
Move them out and compost them
Maybe for some reason you can’t leave the leaves in your yard at all. While as mentioned above, that’s not advisable, you still have some options that lets the material be used for a better purpose than wasting away in your local landfill. One of these options is to compost your leaves.
Since composting is a larger topic, I’ll direct you to the United State’s Environmental Protection Agency here for more information on how to compost at home. But if you do decide to take it on, know that your fallen leaves are perfect materials to add to a compost pile!
They provide both living and dying matter – which means lots of different nutrients for future compost. Ensure that if you use a lot of dead leaves though that high-nitrogen (living) materials are needed to keep your pile in balance. Things like fresh grass clippings or food waste are great options.
Add them to a garden plot
If you don’t compost but still want to move the leaves elsewhere – consider using your leaves as a mulch layer for a current or future garden plot. While most everyone mulches small flower beds, you should also be mulching your big garden plots. A layer of material that keeps down weeds and eventually breaks down to provide nutrients to the soil will keep your garden producing year after year.
Leaves are the perfect material for this purpose. Because they block light, a few inch deep layer around your garden will be very helpful in minimizing weed growth. By the time your next growing season comes around, they will have broken down and returned to the soil where their nutrients will grow all kinds of fruits and vegetables. Then, you can do it all over again when the leaves fall the next Autumn!
Conclusion
Raking leaves into piles and sending them to the landfill is such a normal part of American society that most people don’t even stop to think about its impact. But shipping them off loses all of the natural nutritional value they provide to your soil. It also destroys any opportunity your local wildlife has to live and hunt through it for sustenance. And maybe even worse, the trucks used to haul your fallen leaves are polluting the air and contributing to climate change. Just leaving them be or doing some of the simple steps above will not only save you time – but make your yard and the entire world a better place to live. So this fall, leave the leaves!