Leaving Your Leaves
“Anyone can love a rose, but it takes a lot to love a leaf. It’s ordinary to love the beautiful, but beautiful to love the ordinary.”
— Unknown
Leaving your leaves, the great Fall has come.
I love this time of year. Mornings are crisp with autumn air as I snuggle into my favorite sweater eager to enjoy a hot cup of tea while watching the slow transformation of fall. All around the island, the leaves are completing their cycle, drying, and falling back to the earth. To me, leaves are more than something to clean up or get rid of. I love a tidy garden as much as the next person, but there are wonderful benefits to using this abundant and free resource from nature.
Preparing for winter is an important process for us gardeners, and cleanup is vital. But we want to remember, in our haste to pull every weed and remove unnecessary debris, that some things are better left unattended. Leaves still have a job to do when they fall. They are nature’s blanket, keeping the soil and tree roots warm and moist. They prevent weeds from growing up around your trees and shrubs and over time break down into the natural nutrients required for healthy regeneration and growth.
Some of us will collect the dried fallen leaves for mulch, keeping our garden beds and nature’s beneficial critters warm for the winter season. But so many leaves end up in bags headed to the transfer station! Leaves disposed of in landfills contribute to methane gas build-up and are released into the air. Leaving your leaves will help reduce our carbon footprint and Co2 emissions, and that’s a good thing.
HERE ARE A FEW IMPORTANT REASONS TO LEAVE YOUR LEAVES THIS FALL.
Composting and Soil
According to many garden and soil experts, dried leaves are an excellent resource for potassium, carbon, and micronutrients as they break down for compost. Leaves can be worked into composting containers and mounds, or directly into garden beds to help eliminate soil erosion issues and nutrient leaching, which can happen with Vashon’s sandy soil. As many horticulture experts will tell you, fallen leaves contain 50 to 80 percent of the nutrients a plant extracts from even the sandiest soils. For dense clay soil, tilling a 6-to-8-inch layer of leaves into your planting beds will improve aeration and drainage. These nutrient layers encourage worms, bacteria, insects, and fungi to improve soil structure by creating tunnels that increase nourishment, the flow of oxygen, and moisture.
Wildlife and Pollinators
In addition to leaves providing necessary nutrients to our soil, it is also beneficial to the mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects we share our land with. Leaving leaves may look unruly to some but others will know that it is an essential practice for reducing green waste and helping our native species overwinter, many of which will need habitat to make the winter comfortable. This is especially important because beneficial insects like beetles, spiders, and worms in your leafy mulch will contribute by adding nutrients to your soil along with becoming a yummy source of food for birds and small mammals that are here in the PNW during winter.
Raking your leaves into small mounds or shredding for mulch layers throughout your garden creates natural habitats for small reptiles, amphibians, and mammals. Frogs, snakes, and salamanders snuggle down in the leaves to hibernate for the cold winter months, helping them rest comfortably with a leaf blanket. The pupae of butterflies and moths will also use leaves to overwinter as will swallowtail and other moth larvae.
Plant Protection & Water Conservation
Leaving your dried leaves on the ground provides a protective blanket to reduce frost damage to plants. Many plants in our area are frost tolerant however leaving your leaves can add that extra layer of warmth that will ensure a better chance of surviving the cold weather. Leaves help the ground retain moisture and will help reduce the need to water as often. Using your leaves in the fall will save time and energy well into the summer season when it comes to watering your plants.
Leaves also help protect your plants with weed suppression. Leaves do not prevent weeds, but they significantly reduce the need for weeding beds that have a layer of leaf mulch. Who doesn’t want more time in the hammock and less time weeding?
SO MANY WAYS TO MAKE USE OF YOUR LEAVES, BUT HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THEM WHEN THEY FALL?
1. Leave your leaf fall on your lawn and run through them with your mower a few times to make them fine. This will add more nutrients back into your lawn in addition to all the benefits we talked about above.
2. If your leaves are in abundance and making your plants disappear, you can:
Bag them and punch a few air holes to create a beautiful leaf mold that can be used in your garden the following year, or
Rake into a pile for natural decomposing in an out-of-the-way location on your property, or in an empty compost bin for future use.
Shred dried leaves and create a layer in all your garden beds and around trees and shrubs.
3. Or you can call me and I will gladly come and collect all your unwanted or unusable leaves and make good use of them.
I can’t end this blog without commenting on a little winter preparation for Bees, so along with leaving the leaves, you can also leave seed heads and perennial stalks. Cavity-dwelling bees such as Mason and Golden bees can overwinter in your garden thus increasing your chances of having early pollinators as well as seed heads as an available food source for birds and chipmunks. Finally, if you have your fair share of tree branches, find a nice corner of the yard, and create a small brush pile that will make a sweet habitat for Vashon’s small mammals.
Leaving your leaves is a win-win for us and Mother Nature!
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Learn more about sustainable gardens: The Northwest Garden Manifesto: Create, Restore and Maintain a Sustainable Yard by John Albers and David Perry