By Jean Ponzi
Leave Your Leaves!
As trees drop this year’s productivity, what fall efforts do plants and their pollinators need from you, to help them get through winter? Next to nothing.
Perfect supports are accumulating now, right in their summer activity places.
Most butterfly and moth species overwinter in the landscape, as an egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, or adult. Bumble bees, spiders, snails, worms, beetles, millipedes, mites, and more also rely on leaf litter for protection. These animals, in turn, are food for chipmunks, turtles, birds, and amphibians.
Where insects emerge in spring, they will pollinate promptly. Awakening bugs and garden thrive. Your fall-chore free time can naturally re-weave the Web of Life, underfoot without lifting a finger. Leaving your leaves? What’s not to like?
Do you wrestle with your training (and guilt) to keep a tidy lawn? Spare yourself and your pollinator partners from this kind of aesthetic bugaboo. Prepare to Leave the Leaves!
Webster Groves, a suburb with some landscaping cred, is embarking on a third year Leave the Leaves campaign, in our regional movement toward ecological yard care.
“Raking or mowing fallen leaves cuts the overall biodiversity benefits of your pollinator plantings,” says Webster Green Space Commissioner Carrie Coyne, “but you can modify leaf-moving to suit your situation. For example, if leaves in your front yard would drift into a storm drain, move those off the turf, onto planting beds or in rings around your trees. Pile leaves as a donut, pulled away from the tree trunk out to the drip line, the branching outer perimeter.”
“Be mindful of your neighbors,” says Coyne. “If they love clean, crips edges, move your leaves away from your property borders. Eco-logic is considerate of others: insects, plants, and people. Have a conversation about what you are choosing to do, and why.”
Big benefits also accrue to our trees and soil, when Nature’s rich organic “waste” is allowed to transform in place instead of being raked and bagged up and hauled away. Leaf litter becomes Leaf Largesse.
I used to mow up our fallen leaves to mulch my yard. I’ve learned that cutting up leaves cuts up the insects sheltering in them – especially when mowing under trees. No more autumn mows for me!
Corin Purcell, Coyne’s fellow Webster commissioner, explains: “Forests are self-mulching! Leaves provide free, healthy nutrients that trees need. When we tap into forest expertise and let fallen leaves decay, they add organic matter back into the soil, so you don’t need to fertilize. And micro-organisms, the life in soil, need food and nutrients all the time. Everybody’s nourished, everybody thrives – and you pay less and do less work.”
From experience, these folks advise that a winter coat of leaves will help, not kill, the grass. “Some cover is beneficial, like mulch in your garden,” says Coyne. “Decaying leaves help turf roots and soil retain water, as much as 20-40%.”
Both emphatically state why leaving leaves is sustainable: “Mowing and blowing use fossil fuels and make neighborhoods noisy,” says Coyne. Purcell adds, “We can improve our quality of life, along with ecological health, by letting Nature manage the season-ending work of fall.”
Enjoy some autumn rambles in the hours you reclaim from raking and mowing – and let Nature nourish you!
Jean Ponzi is a longtime local voice for Earth, through her work for Missouri Botanical Garden and on our late, great community radio station KDHX. She’s focused now in partnerships with Native Plants, especially trees.