There are yards in my neighborhood that are raked and mowed and 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. This strategy is of course most beneficial to wildlife and quite frankly, cheaper and less intensive to manage.
This blog series “Bringing Hope Home” is all about native plant gardening. “Let Leaves Lie” is the 4th post in the series and will make the argument for why you should pass on raking those leaves! I invite to you visit our other posts for related topics.
Leaf litter is natural. In a thriving ecosystem, leaves fall, they are either decomposed or eaten, blown away in the wind or burned in a natural wildfire, increasing the rate at which the nutrients are useful to the survivors. Yet when it comes to our parks, campuses and home yards, we insist that leaves are the enemy of fall, not the free fertilization and security blanket they truly are.
Why do we insist on a leafless lawn/yard? Is there shame in letting leaves lie, like the mustard stain on an otherwise clean white shirt you don’t notice until your presentation is about to begin? Oops! The choice to spend time piling leaves out on the curb for waste pick up is 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. You’ll have to shell out money for store bought mulch when fallen leaves are free.
In doing so you create shelter for wild creatures. You preserve the eggs and larvae that are attached to the leaves as they fall. You provide a food source for many wild animals. You protect delicate plants by surrounding them in leaves, protecting them through winter. 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 4 years ago when we stopped putting our leaves out on the curb. The wooded lot behind our property supplies a lot of leaves. The first two drops usually 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 who are shutting down for the season.
The next leaf drop or two may end up in our compost bin or being mowed directly into our lawn. Doing so is enriching and the leaf bits are small enough to not block sunlight from 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 this 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 strawberries 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 the 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.