There are yards in my neighborhood that are raked, mowed, watered and landscaped to perfection and those yards are lovely.
However, my favorite yard is a little less tended to. Seed heads have not been lopped off. Leaves are massed on the beds; the lawn is minimal and overall the space is colorful and lively. My neighbor’s gardening strategy is of course most beneficial to wildlife and quite frankly, cheaper and less intensive to manage.
My blog series “Bringing Hope Home” is all about gardening for wildlife. This piece is the 4th post in the series and will make the argument for why you should pass on raking those leaves each fall! and with the time you save not raking this season, you could read the first 3 pieces in this gardening for wildlife series:
But let’s get back to those fall leaves.
Leaf litter is natural. In a thriving ecosystem, leaves fall. They create habitat and insulate the forest floor, retaining water in the ecosystem. They are blown away by the wind, eaten by forest floor scavengers, or decomposed by bacteria and fungal spores. They can fuel a forest fire, which, when allowed to burn often and naturally, quickens the process of nutrient cycling from leaf biomass to healthy soil, becoming useful nutrients to surviving trees. They are immensely beneficial! Yet somehow, we’ve come to understand leaves as the enemy of fall, litter to our parks, campuses and home yards. We seem to tolerate leaf litter on our lawns less than plastic litter in our waterways. We certainly expend more energy picking up the former than the latter.
Why do we insist on a leafless lawn/yard? Is there shame in letting leaves lie? Does it just seem lazy? Or chaotic? The choice to spend weekends raking leaves out to the curb for waste pick-up is both a time and a money suck. You’ll lose money in the form of your time spent raking, or on the cost to pay another to do the work. You’ll lose money when you pay for fertilization in the spring, after disposing of free fertilization in the fall. You’ll have to shell out money for store bought mulch to cover your garden beds when the leaves are free. You pay taxes to fund the trucks and the fuel for weekly municipal waste disposal.
In doing so you create shelter for wild creatures. You preserve insect eggs and larvae that are attached to the leaves as they fall, meant to overwinter and emerge in the spring (fireflies rely on leaf litter for reproduction). By leaving piles of fallen leaves you provide a food source for many wild animals. You protect delicate plants from harsh winter weather. You retain soil moisture therefore reducing the need for watering and you fertilize your garden beds when the leaves are decomposed, creating a rich dark soil that is spongy, aerated and nutritious.
I believe it was about 5 years ago when we stopped putting our leaves out to the curb. The wooded lot behind our property supplies a lot of leaves. The first two drops each fall now end up raked or blown to our garden beds where they stay all winter. We tuck them around what’s left of our perennial plants which are shutting down for the season.
The next leaf drop or two may end up in our compost bin or being mulched directly into our lawn with our electric mower. Doing so is enriching and the mulched leaf bits are small enough to not block sunlight to the grass. I have absolutely noticed a change in our soil quality. A lawn expert even commented on the quality of our lawn soil when he seeded our yard one year. It is dark, spongy and fertile!
My yard is a balance between what the HOA expects and what nature needs. So, while we’ve tried to reduce the square footage of total lawn on our ¼ acre property, we nevertheless have a lawn, weedy and green. In the backyard it is mostly clover, wild violets and mock strawberry and unfortunately invasive Asian stilt grass! The beds we used to pay to mulch now look a bit messy, but intentional. Whatever life is meant to spring from the leaf litter is permitted time to develop and nutrients are naturally cycled into the soil. And my time is spent less on hauling leaves to the curb and more on tucking in plants and feeding the millipedes while I enjoy the seasonal cycles of nature.