This article leans to heavy on the word “experts”, but people who read a column called “Climate Solutions” probably still work for the greater good as defined by experts.
To best support wildlife and soil health, experts say leaves should be left where they fall.
The soil may be healthy, but it won’t support grass growth. Leaves block sunlight and acidify the soil. Your lawn will resemble a forest floor, with no grass, mostly dirt with sparse vegetation.
“The fallen leaf layer is actually really important wildlife habitat,” said David Mizejewski, a naturalist with the National Wildlife Federation, a nonprofit conservation organization. “All sorts of creatures rely on that for their survival as a place where they can find food and cover, and in many cases even complete their life cycle.”
Who wants a wildlife habitat for a lawn? Squirrels in the trees are great, chipmunks are okay, but they seem to be up to something. Mice and voles are vermin who can live in the wood with the raccoons, coyotes, opossums and the rest of the wildlife menagerie.
Bagging up your leaves and sending them to a landfill “is by far the worst thing” to do, Mizejewski said. In 2018, landfills received about 10.5 million tons of yard trimmings, which includes leaves, or just over 7 percent of all waste thrown away, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
This does make sense. It always seemed unreasonable to put organic waste like leaves and grass clippings in plastic bags to be buried in a landfill.
While a light scattering of leaves on a lawn could also be beneficial to your grass, too thick of a layer could smother the turf, experts said. Mizejewski added that the fallen foliage might also harbor pests, such as ticks, so it’s important to follow best practices to protect yourself.
Still, he and other experts said removing all the leaves isn’t the answer.
“You don’t have to keep them on your lawn where they fall, but what we want you to do is keep them on property,” he said. “Don’t get rid of them.”
Ticks are a big problem here because there is so much forest.
Any lot size above a half-acre or so, has room for a mulch box. Grass clippings and leaves will break down by next year. Bagging yard waste makes no sense. It doesn’t make much sense for the city to send a truck around to vacuum up leaves in the Fall.
Don’t give away your carbon. I mulch my grass and the errant leaves early in the season. When the trees start dropping in earnest, I blow the leaves into the woods. The ticks and voles can go nuts as long as they stay over there.
