9 Ways to Turn Your Fall Leaves Into Garden Gold
Shortening days and chilly nights ensure thousands of leaves fall throughout North America. This natural process is a lovely spectacle, as trees turn red, brown, orange, and yellow before they drop their leaves. With all those leaves in your yard, you may be wondering how to deal with them. Wonder no more! Join backyard gardener Jerad Bryant in turning fall leaves into garden gold.
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Fall leaves are a free resource for your garden. They fall by the thousands each autumn, decorating the ground with rich hues of red, orange, and yellow. Old maintenance practices are out of date, as they encourage excess waste. Don’t bag them up in black trash bags—there are easy clean-up solutions no matter what type of garden you cultivate.
There are many ways you can turn them into amendments for your soil. Some are simple and easy, requiring little work on your part. Others are more labor-intensive but rewarding, as they deliver quick results or nutrient-rich soil.
No matter how you recycle them, you can do so knowing you’re helping your local ecosystem. Leaving those leaves allows insects, small creatures, and worms to thrive below the soil. It boosts microbial activity, encouraging fungi, bacteria, and archaea to grow and spread. A decaying leaf is nature’s way of refreshing the world’s soil annually—help this process along to enjoy its full benefits.
Enrich a Compost Pile
Dry leaves are an excellent compost amendment, adding carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients to the pile. They’re almost 50% carbon by weight and are a brown material for composting ratios. Compost piles need two kinds of debris: green and brown.
Brown material includes fall foliage, straw, twigs, sawdust, and paper. These materials have lots of carbon and little nitrogen. Green materials are things like kitchen scraps, garden waste, and grass clippings. They add more nitrogen than carbon, feeding bacteria in the pile and helping them reproduce.
For healthy compost, use two or three shovelfuls of brown material and one shovelful of green material. This ensures the pile smells good and works efficiently. Turn your pile every day or every other day, and keep its moisture at 50%. It should feel like a wrung-out sponge. It’ll turn into humus-rich, black, crumbly soil in three weeks or longer.
Make Leaf Mold
Leaf mold is like compost, except it’s made entirely of leaves! It’s easier than composting and perfect for lazy gardeners like me. Leaf mold is a carbon-rich amendment ideal for woody trees, shrubs, and perennials. It’ll help your vegetables, but it helps woody plants the most.
Make leaf mold by stacking piles of your leaves in autumn. Make the piles three feet tall, wide, and long. Wet foliage shouldn’t need additional moisture, although dry ones will. You’ll want your leaf pile to have 50% moisture, similar to compost. It’ll feel like a wrung-out sponge when you grasp a clump.
Turn your leaf mold pile as often as you’d like. Daily turning creates leaf mold quickly, and less turning yields slower decay. Start using it when it looks black, crumbly, and squishy. Apply it on your raised beds, tree wells, or around woody shrubs.
Mulch Your Beds
Leaves make excellent mulch! Forests use them to enrich their soils, especially where deciduous trees grow. Walk through a forest and you’ll see a thick leaf litter layer. When you brush a handful of it aside, you see rich, loose soil underneath. They make natural compost as they decay, and all you have to do is put them in an ideal location!
Mulch your beds by applying a layer that’s two or three inches thick. Mark where your herbaceous perennials and bulbs are to reveal weak growing species. Some bulbs, like daffodils and tulips, will penetrate the leaf litter. Others may need you to push it aside as they sprout in spring. Use twigs or bamboo stakes to mark the plants until spring.
Gardeners with frozen winters won’t see leaves turn into dirt until summer or fall, as ice slows the decomposition process. Other growers with mild, wet winters will see fresh dirt by spring or summer. Leaves are a free, organic mulch you can use for any plant, no matter its size.
Fill Containers
Dry, decaying leaves work well in potting soil mixes. They add structure, nutrients, and space to soils. Fresh ones may invite fungus gnats, so make sure they’re completely dry before you add them to the mix.
Use dry ones for containers, whether they’re indoors or outdoors. Add a handful for every gallon of soil, and mix them well. Add compost or leaf mold to boost the mix’s nutrition and drainage capabilities. Avoid adding more than a handful of leaves, as too many can prevent roots from growing and cause drainage issues.
Dry foliage decays indoors or out, as soil organisms are present everywhere. Outdoors, they’ll decompose quickly, creating rich soil inside the container. If you notice fungus gnats or any other bug flying around the pots, use yellow sticky traps to catch the adults. Note these will trap other insects as well. Water your plants less, if you can, and the gnats will slowly dissipate.
Help Your Lawn
Leaves are a nutrient-rich amendment for any plant! This includes grasses, as they boost grass growth in lawns, native prairies, and grassy riversides. If you tend a lawn where you live, you may notice tree foliage falling on top throughout autumn. Invest in a lawn mower with a mulch plug, and you can chop them up so they feed your lawn.
Mulch plugs block the flow of lawn debris so that the mower’s blades chop it into little pieces. You can mulch leaves, long lawns, and overgrown weeds. The debris falls in between the grass blades and feeds the soil below.
Mow annually with a mulch plug, and you may not need to fertilize your lawn! Chop leaves and grass blades together and create the perfect mix for healthy soil. Leaves have carbon, fresh grass has nitrogen, and the two decay together to create crumbly, humus-rich topsoil.
Brew Leaf Tea
Leaf tea sounds disgusting! That’s because it’s not a tea you drink, but one you feed your plants with. Leaf tea leaches the nutrients out of decaying foliage into water. This brew feeds plants quicker than compost or mulch since it can reach the root zone deep below the soil.
Make leaf tea by placing leaves inside a sealable container. Fill the container with water, and let the brew sit for two or three days. Mix the brew daily with a stick to aerate the mixture and keep bad smells away. After three days, strain the water. The leaf tea feeds woody plants with the nutrients they need, and it’s also beneficial for perennials and annuals.
The leftover material composts quickly now that they’re wet and already decomposing. Mix them into your piles, or spread them over the soil as mulch. Leaf tea is a superb garden amendment since it produces both liquid and solid soil amendments.
Invite Wildlife
Wildlife loves hiding under debris. Take advantage of this by creating a brush pile for them to move into. Mix fall leaves with twigs, branches, and pine cones. Leave the pile somewhere safe from disturbance, where the animals can roam freely.
Brush piles help spiders, snakes, slugs, snails, bees, ladybugs, and flies survive winter. Without precious cover, these species suffer and die under extreme freezes. The brush pile provides warmth, protection, and a safe place to enter dormancy.
The only occasion you’ll want to avoid making a wildlife pile is if you have rats, mice, or cockroaches in your area. These pests quickly take over these piles and run rampant throughout the garden. First, remedy the pest issue before creating a wildlife structure. You’ll avoid helping invasive species spread further.
Create Garden Art
Dry fall leaves morph into gorgeous fall art pieces that you can use to decorate your house, or that you can gift to friends and family. Start by drying them on a flat tray with good airflow. You want them dry but workable, and not crunchy. Once they’re pliable they’re ready for art.
Glue them to pieces, make paper mache out of them, or preserve them in a see-through material. Dry leaves lack color, so they’ll last in their new shape for years. Another cool way to use them is as prints on clay, paper, or a similar material. Press them into soft clay and pull them up to reveal a perfect print underneath.
Fire-baked clay pieces survive outdoor conditions and make excellent garden art. Place pieces on stands to have them at eye level or hide them amongst perennials and annuals to make a garden treasure hunt. However you use them, your art pieces will remind you of fall’s beauty for seasons to come.
Gift Leaves To A Friend
When in doubt, help your friends out! Leaves are nutrient-rich amendments for everyone, regardless of your garden’s conditions. Find friends to gift extra ones to if you have too many. You can share with them these nine ways to transform fallen tree foliage into garden gold, so you both can have beautiful gardens in spring.
If your friends don’t need them, many community gardens do! These organizations rely on volunteers to help them function. Ask around your community and you’ll find someone in need. My local community garden takes leaves in so they can make leaf mold to give out to volunteers. Help your local one out, and they might gift you with free resources!
The last thing you can do with your leaves is put them in a yard waste bin. Some municipalities have composting programs that make mulch with garden scraps. They tend to have large machinery that works better than a composting pile.
No matter how you use your garden debris, you’re doing a good deed by not throwing it in the trash. Save organic matter from landfills because it has many perfect use cases in our gardens. When you leave the leaves, you help the soil, wildlife, and plants thrive around you.