With cooler temperatures and shorter daylight hours the leaves should start dropping from our trees pretty soon. Some have already started although I think those already dropping are falling from exhaustion due to our hot and dry summer, but enough about me… So, assuming the leaves will eventually drop, let’s talk about the importance of those leaves in our ecosystem and some alternate approaches you might consider taking with your leaves. Yes, we talked about leaves in the garden last week, but what about leaves in your lawn, driveway, patio, and along the curb

Surely, I’m not the only one that doesn’t really enjoy raking and bagging my leaves. I enjoyed it even less when we paid someone to do it because, ultimately, I knew we were paying someone to do something that I could do. But before you consider raking and bagging your leaves, did you know that those leaves contain about 1% nitrogen. Granted, that’s not a lot of nitrogen, but it’s as much nitrogen as you will find in composted manure and people purchase bags of that all the time. But that’s not all the nutrients you will find in leaves. Leaves also contain potassium, phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, magnesium, boron, manganese, iron, chloride, copper, sodium, and zinc. So, first of all, if you have a fair amount of leaves, those leaves are essentially fertilizer, falling from the sky.

In addition, leaves are organic matter and most soil in Oklahoma does not contain very much organic matter. So, how do we take advantage of these free nutrients? Here’s how.

First of all, you have to normalize not raking, bagging, and having them hauled off. They need to stick around. A good strategy is to just mow the leaves in you lawn with a mulching lawn mower. Believe it or not, this will only add a couple of additional mowings for the year and for my money, I would much rather mow than rake up leaves.

When you mow them, you are grinding them up which makes the organic matter and nutrients more readily available to your landscape. It’s hard to believe if you’ve never done it, but one pass over the leaves with a good mulching mower and you won’t even know there were leaves there before. So, this makes the lawn leaves a project you can take care of inexpensively.

Next, what do we do with the leaves that fall on the driveway, patio, and up next to the curb? For those leaves, I purchased a leaf mulcher. At the time, they were only about $100. They have almost doubled in price, but if you have ever paid someone to remove the leaves from your yard, that $200 would go pretty quick. So, I would rake up those leaves, run them through the mulcher, put them in plastic bags, and then save those bags till spring. You may think where in the world am I going to put those bags all winter. But most of us have a corner of the yard, or someplace along the side of the house where we could store a few bags, especially if storing to bags is going to save us some money. Then in spring, you can dump those mulched leaves on your garden beds and then you have a very, natural, earth-friendly mulch in place.

If you don’t want to invest in the leaf mulcher, you can use your mulching lawn mower to grind up the leaves. While this method is a little more labor intensive, it accomplishes the same purposes.

At our old house, I would end up with 15 to 20 mulched bags of leaves which fulfilled all of our garden mulch needs. However, we moved last year and our new house only has one large tree, so I’m not sure this single tree will be able to meet all of our garden mulch needs, but we’ll give it a shot.

One of the interesting things about this strategy and something I also mention when teaching about this topic, is that no one fertilizes the forest. It is a closed system that has been supporting itself for a very long time. So, when we mimic some of nature’s natural strategy, we are taking advantage of tried-and-true methodologies.

Now, some of you will likely push back on this a little by saying that you clean up the garden in the fall to help reduce the insect population for the next year. This makes a certain amount of sense, but this strategy also discourages the development of the beneficial insects that work to counter those other insects that try to devour our garden during the growing season. The bottom line is that a diverse eco-system will need less effort on your part trying to manage insect damage in the future. Once again…a win-win. See you in the garden!

You can get answers to all your gardening questions by calling the Tulsa Master Gardeners Help Line at 918-746-3701, dropping by our Diagnostic Center at 4116 E. 15th Street, or by emailing us at mg@tulsamastergardeners.org. Photo: Tom Ingram