Trust in nature – and stop raking up your garden leaves
Trust in nature – and stop raking up your garden leaves
Yes, the fallen foliage can be messy. But the trees know just what they’re doing – and they won’t thank you for interfering, writes Alys Fowler
Some choice quotes from the article:
[S]pent leaves that flutter to the ground aren’t a waste product. They are rich in carbon and play an essential role for the tree and the ecology it supports.
The leaves act as a physical barrier for soil, keeping it and its many microbes insulated, and also for the tree roots, as the wet mats of autumn leaves shelter the fragile top layer from the drying winds.
Many, many things live in these dead leaf layers: caterpillars of moths and butterflies, their chrysalises, beetles, centipedes, springtails, woodlice and spiders … and doesn’t the blackbird know it, rustling through the leaves?
No one loves wet autumn leaves more than earthworms, though. Sensing one of their favourite things, they start to work on incorporating them into the soil. Earthworms line their homes with autumn leaves, using them for bedding and then, because they are good housekeepers, they eat them as they break down.
Leave the leaves be: they are not a mess, a waste or a hindrance – they are life and vital with it.
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Usually I mulch mow my leaves. This year I just left them whole. We'll see come spring how much the anti-leaf doomsayers are correct or not. "It can kill grass!" they say. Well, I'm not trying to make my yard look like a golf course in the first place, so maybe let's start there.
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Golf course lawns are lame and terrible for the environment.
I've actually realised the same.. A month ago, I've bought thousands of flower seeds and just seeded my whole lawn and told my housemate to stop mowing.
Front lawn is already full of small flowers (and in another month, hoping by mid summer), since I went overboard, hoping they've overtaken all the grass.
Also, planning to seed bomb the nature strips around me lol... Going to buy up 20 packets or more of random seeds and sprinkle them around my block
Make sure the seeds you buy are for local varieties of plants! Local grasses, flowers, trees, bushes, even so called weeds as long as they're native to the area! Weeds aren't real, we made it up; there is only native and invasive. All plants serve a purpose in their natural habitat!
Yep. I've been ordering seeds online only listed as native to Australia. Same as the fruit trees and such I have started growing in my yard.
Not sure if they're local to my exact area btw, but native to Australia, apparently yes.
Had a bit of storm came thru that ripped the bark off of nearby trees and littered my front yard with them. The next day I enjoyed watching the birds scavenge through them for bugs and bit of nectar from the nearby dropped flowers.
It will be interesting. I cannot envision how leaving several inches of leaves on the lawn is a good idea. Leaving a lot of property just natural though. That may make sense.
I think "several inches" is a bit overwrought. It's like one layer of leaves that will be mulched up the instant I mow next spring. And what is a "good idea"? What's going to happen? Some grass might die. Oh noes, the world will end!
We need to rethink how we live in all respects. And not depleting lawns of nutrients that we have to replace with artificial fertilizer is part of that
But you'll be "the weird neighbor" if you don't have perfectly green, trimmed and clean lawn!
Bonus!
I am definitely the bad kid on the block lol
We recently got a chip drop and cardboard/mulched the entire yard in prep for a more food and natives oriented lawn (and to kill the grass). The neighbors and family are incredulous, but the enormous earthworms we keep finding seem to enjoy it. When the leaves started falling we started mixing them with the mulch, even asked some neighbors for their bagged leaves.
I think they'll understand better when it starts taking shape. And anyway, it's not their lawn, who cares!
That was me last fall with my "trash and leaves pile" that is now a nice new garden with flowers and decorative grass
You need to add that to the previous comment. You sounded like a loon who thought that leaves wouldn't do any damage if left on top of the grass to smother them. You will lose some grass and depending on how many leaves as well the temp and amount of rainfall, you could end up with a ton of dead grass. I cleared my leaves as soon as I could after they fell.
Depending on how wind interacts with the location, many leaves are likely to end up congregating at boundaries like fences or walls or around taller garden elements like herbaceous perennials, shrubs, and trees. Smaller parcels with large canopy trees may run into this problem, but the aforementioned pattern plays out in our ⅒ acre poultry yard with several large deciduous trees overhead.
It absolutely will kill the grass underneath and you'll be left with a dirt patch all spring and summer speaking from experience.
It definitely can kill grass if you have enough trees and therefore leaves. I still have a few dead spots from the leaves I missed last year. I do basic maintenance and care for my yard and it's thicker and more lush than neighbors who go full tilt. Part of that maintenance is making sure the leaves don't kill the grass. I did one round of mowing the leaves and when I could finally get around to clearing the rest that dropped instead of mowing I blew it all into the storm ditch.
I have a major problem with the idea of bagging it up and sending it somewhere else, but, you do need to get the leaves off of any grass that you want to survive and grow. Maybe you don't care about having grass, that's cool but for the umpteenth time here just so I get it across, leaves can and will kill grass.
We tried this with ours and the yard looked kind of gross through the spring but it didn’t kill the grass. I had to do that myself. Now we have a nice yard of Dutch clover started with plans to over-seed it in spring again.