This Easy, Lazy Science Hack Ditches Raking And Leaves Lawns Healthier

Instead of bagging fall leaves, take the lazy way out and get a more environmentally friendly yard. Autumn is the season to gaze at gorgeous leaves of gold, yellow, and orange as they flutter from the trees and fall on our yards – but then, of course, comes the tedious task of raking them up and trying to decide what to do with them. SciLine interviewed , a professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Delaware, who says taking a lazy approach is actually a win for your garden and the critters that live there.

A layer of leaves on the lawn will exclude light, which would be detrimental to the lawn. So when the leaves fall, either rake them up or chop them up with a lawn mower so they are finer and can sift down through the grass blades. But if they fall in a landscape bed or under trees, shrubs, and larger plants, it’s fine to just leave the leaves without mulching them.

The leaves contain nutrients, and they are also a source of organic matter. So, if you allow the leaves to go back into the landscape, you are providing nutrients for the plants to take up, and you are providing organic matter that will improve the soil structure. If you think about forests, where leaves just naturally return to the soil and decompose every year, it’s some of the richest soil we have.

By allowing that to happen in your landscape beds, you’re getting . Chopping them up will dramatically reduce the blowing of the leaves. Make them smaller by either mowing over the leaves where they fall in the lawn or raking them into piles and then mowing them.

There are also leaf vacuums that vacuum, chop up, and put the leaves in a bag. Then, you spread the leaves on your landscape beds. If you rake up your leaves, put them in a black plastic bag, and have them taken off to a landfill, then they never get to decompose and return those nutrients and organic matter back to the soil.

Instead, you’re taking what and making it a problem. Also, many insects spend the winter in leaf litter. A lot of people might not want insects in their landscape, but only about 2% of all the insects in the world .

Most of them are either beneficial or of no consequence to humans, and they are very important food sources for birds and other animals. Birds feed the insects, especially caterpillars, to their hatchlings. So, by allowing the insects to overwinter in the leaf litter, you’re supporting bird populations and, of course, pollinators, which help plants produce seeds that can .

In the fall, because that is when turf grass is primarily growing roots, and you’re promoting the kind of grass growth that makes a healthy, dense lawn. When you fertilize in the spring, your grass is growing leaves at that point, so you’re really just causing the grass to grow more and grow faster, and you will need to mow more often. So, it really to fertilize in the spring.

Also, when you chop up the leaves in the fall, you are actually fertilizing them because you’re putting those chopped-up leaves back into the soil. But it’s a good idea to add some additional fertilizer besides just the leaf litter. The suburban norm is to have a lawn with some decorative plants around the house or at the end of the driveway.

But I think it’s a good idea to sort of and design areas of the lawn that provide play and gathering spaces and then figure out what everything else can be. It’s just a different way of thinking about the landscape and much more environmentally sensitive. It will provide all kinds of ecosystem services, whether it’s better water infiltration or better air quality.

If we think about pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, we’re doing it a lot more if we’ve got a ground cover, a shrub layer, a small tree layer, than we are if we have just a lawn. .