Don’t bag those leaves — leave them
Leaves are a great source of organic matter but need to be shredded or cut up into smaller pieces to leave in the flower beds or lawns.
People sometimes guilt others for bagging leaves and putting them at the curb. If these are NOT going to the landfill, it’s OK to do this. Hopefully they are going to a composting facility to be “recycled.”
However, I have another option for those fall leaves; mow over them several times and let them improve your soil by adding organic matter.
Organic matter is the best way to improve heavy compacted clay soils. It helps to build structure, which includes aggregates that have macro and micro pores to allow for root growth and water movement.
Leaves are a great source of organic matter but need to be shredded or cut up into smaller pieces to leave in the flower beds or lawns.
Large leaves such as sycamore, maples, tulip poplar and others tend to form a mat over the ground and take a longer time to break down. This can be detrimental to a lawn or flower bed as it prevents water from penetrating into the soil of flower beds.
Packed, layered leaves keep the grass moist underneath, which could lead to disease issues or tissue death if the layer is thick enough.
By chopping these leaves, either through a lawnmower or a chipper shredder, you decrease the amount of time it takes to break them down into useable organic matter.
I love to add leaf mold to the garden as my organic matter. Leaf mold is essentially composted leaves from trees; in other words, it has gone through the composting process.
I have not found anyone around my area that produces leaf mold, but if you find someone, it’s like gold for the garden.
This process of leaf composting is a slow one since leaves are primarily composed of carbon. Unless you add nitrogen-rich material such as grass clippings and green herbaceous tissue, the composting process is slow.
However, leaves eventually break down and add organic matter to your lawn or flowerbed. If you have the capacity to store the chopped-up leaves, once they are composted, you can incorporate them into the soil.
It’s not recommended to incorporate fresh chopped leaves directly into the soil as they need more time to break down to provide the organic matter benefit.
We don’t’ have a lot of trees in our landscape, but we do get the neighbors maple and tulip poplar leaves. We simply mow the lawn a last few times and chop these up to fall to the soil.
I have a lot of black locust trees on the edge of our property. Their small leaflets fall into the lawn and flowerbeds, and I leave them alone. They are small enough to break down a bit faster than the larger leaves.
When I first started all of my flowerbeds, I had the township dump several truckloads of the chopped up leaves in our yard. I spread these out over the bare soil and let them do their job.
Organic matter is the magic cure for compacted clay soils and consider your tree leaves as a source of it.