During the fall season, many garden owners have to deal with leaves falling off the trees.
These can be efficiently utilised or cleaned. However, leaves can be a useful material if you want to improve soil drainage. In this article, we will present to you some ways of how to deal with leaves in the yard.
Clean the leaves
Autumn is a special challenge for the gardener. After the vegetable garden has been harvested, you have to take care of the leaves that have dropped from trees. Leaves that have remained lying on the lawn for too long cause yellow spots. Such leaves should be taken away as fast as possible so that their pathogens don’t spread in the garden. Especially nut trees and cherries are increasingly affected by fungal diseases. Diseased leaves turn black or show symptoms such as deformations, or black spots. The best you can do with them is to dispose of them in the bio-waste bin.
But how do you collect the leaves from the garden? With a leaf brush or leaf rake? There are many leaf extractors and cordless blowers available on the market. The industry promises to make gardening work more comfortable. However, such devices are usually noisy and not very suitable for tiny gardens. Also, they can harm small animals in the garden. To make it easier for hedgehogs and other animals to live their own garden, one should, therefore, use the good old leaf rake or leaf broom. If the dry leaves are regularly cleaned out, working in the fresh air can be a pleasure.
Collect leaves with a mower
If your garden is really big, you can use your mower to collect leaves. The mower will shred the leaves to smaller pieces, so they’ll be easy to handle. This simple hack will help you to bag leaves, which you can reuse as compost or mulch.
Turn leaves into a compost
If you have too many leaves, place them in a heap in the corner of your garden. Leave them there for a few months so they can digest or rot and see how they turn into the best compost you've ever seen.
Leaves storage – happy hedgehogs
Depending on the number of trees, sometimes there can be too many leaves on the garden bedding. Therefore, it can be a bad idea to leave them as natural compost. In such circumstances, it’s advisable to create your own leaves storage. Using wire and wide tape, this can be done easily and fast. If you tie the ends of the wire and tape together, you can build great leave storage, which can be set up in all required sizes. Such hand-made storage can be filled-up by leaves and then covered with a net, so you don’t have to worry about the wind blowing away leaves.
Benefits of leaves
Leaves in your garden may offer many benefits, also financial ones!
While leaves should be entirely removed from the lawn, they offer good protection against winter frosts on the flower border or under bushes.
Leaves act as great as a natural bedding layer. However, a little care must be taken that the plants growing there are not completely covered.
Leaves form natural bedding that suppresses weeds and make the soil fertile. Why spend money on compost and fertiliser if you can make them by yourself?
- Cover the bottom of your vegetable garden with a thick layer of leaves in the fall – a simple but extremely effective way to keep the earth fertile.
- Leaves are also a great addition to your compost pile. By storing the leaves on a pile next to your compost stack, you can use them throughout the winter. Sprinkle a layer of leaves to the kitchen waste that you plan to use as compost.
- You can also use leaves to reinvent a piece of garden that has fallen into decay. Build a tall leaf pile and leave it through the whole winter. In the spring, the lower part of this storage will be transformed into rich earth/humus. The middle and top layers can be used as compost.
- A soil rich in humus saves money because you have to apply less fertiliser.
- A humus-rich soil will retain moisture better, which means that you don’t have to water your lawn so frequently, which saves water and lowers your bills!
- Moreover, you save your back because you don't have to tidy up as long as those leaves are left
Conclusion
As you can see, there are some ways that you can deal with leaves in the yard. Leaves can be stored through the winter to make compost or can be used as a layer in the vegetable garden. Also, they can save the lives of small animals living in your garden. We hope that this article has provided you with some ideas about dealing with leaves.
