Let fallen leaves lie
I’m happy to have my friend Carole Brown guest posting today. Thanks Carole! When you’re done reading this, you’ll want to check out her blog for more great advice like this.
The streets in my neighborhood are lined with bulging paper bags. It’s an amazing phenomenon that happens this time every year, as people devote entire weekends to noisily blowing, raking, and bagging the fallen leaves, only to do it all over again the next weekend. The decibel level outside my home is really quite deafening. The bags stand at attention along the sidewalks until the city trucks come to haul them away.
This scenario is common in communities around the country, but we need to wake up and recognize the enormous environmental cost of this yearly ritual.
First, aside from a bothersome noise level, leaf blowers, like most gas-powered lawn equipment, run on 2-cycle engines which are notorious for being extremely energy inefficient. These engines waste a lot of gasoline, which when multiplied by all the homeowners around the country who use them, amounts to 800 billion gallons of gasoline a year. My vote: put the blower away.
More gasoline is then used by all the trucks needed to haul these leaves away, taking up enormous amounts of space in landfills. Even if your township has leaf composting, it still has to be hauled by trucks. After the leaves are removed, many homeowners then have loads of mulch trucked in, using more gasoline.
A much better plan is to let the leaves be. No, don’t leave them on your sidewalk or other pathways, but sweep them into your garden beds and under your shrubs and trees, where they will break down while nourishing your soil, protect it from erosion, and provide an insulating layer to prevent heaving.
Leaf litter is very important to soil and plant health, feeding the soil by returning nutrients to it, providing organic matter, ensuring plant health, and providing habitat for many organisms and wildlife. The leaves contain all the nutrients necessary for healthy soil and healthy plants so you won’t need any supplemental fertilizer, which will save you money and protect the environment.
Your garden will be much healthier if the leaves remain, you’ll be saving a lot of gasoline, and your weekends will be free to enjoy. Everybody wins!
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Carole Brown is the author and creator of Ecosystem Gardening . A Conservation Biologist with a love for wildlife, Carole is a consultant and educator, teaching homeowners, businesses, and land managers to create welcoming habitats for wildlife in their gardens and around their properties. Carole can be found on twitter @CB4wildlife
Really fabulous, timely advice Carole. Thank you.
The bulk of our leaves are in our composter or piled in my veg garden. There is another covering on our property after all last week’s wind and rain that will end up in the composter or in the garden beds.
I just hate to see bagged leaves. This year all of our leaves were mulched into the grass. It needed some gas, but it works! In Kansas it’s too windy for leaves to stay put in flower and shrub beds, unless there is a fence all the way around.
Mulching into the grass is a good idea. If you just let leaves lie, that could be a problem depending on the neighborhood– if they blow into your neighbors’ lawns, and they haven’t caught on to leaving leaves.
Thanks for having me Robin, it’s a pleasure to be here. This is one of those simple things where every one wins: your soil and plants win, you have more free time, and the environment wins. I love win-win!