First Saturday Green 101: Going green with brown leaves

By motomynd

This is the time of year when the heat of summer yields to the coolness of fall, and the autumn leaves put on a spectacular show.
    Then they fall to the ground.
    One evening you watch the sun set through a vivid curtain of glowing reds and golds and think how wonderful it is. The next morning you wake to a blanket of leaves where your grass used to be, and you think what a disaster it is.
    So how do you deal with it? Call a lawn care service and have them do your dirty work for you? Crank up your leaf blower and shuffle them toward your neighbor’s yard? Rake them into piles and burn them? Gather them in plastic bags and throw them in the trash? Rev up the mulching mower and shred them into tiny pieces?
    Your answer to those questions will put a stamp on you as an environmentally aware, 21st century “green” homeowner, or mark you as the modern equivalent of a 1950s smokestack belching unfiltered coal soot.
    Let’s explore some options for dealing with fallen leaves:

1. Put a professional hit on them. NO! The first thing a homeowner needs to understand about a lawn care service is what they do best. And what they do best is make sure you always need a lawn care service. Especially when it comes to dealing with leaves.
    The most vivid example of this is what I saw one beautiful fall day when driving to a local trail head for a long run. On my way out, a crew was on the south side of my street using leaf blowers to remove a carpet of leaves from one of my neighbor’s yards. On my way back later that afternoon, another crew was dealing with piles of leaves in a neighbor’s yard on the opposite side of the street. Does anyone else see the arms race developing here? “CALL AAA LAWN SERVICE: We Use Nuclear Powered leaf Blowers!”

2. Blow them: NO! When it comes to moving leaves, it's not unlike any other human technology: Nature ultimately wins. If you are familiar with a thing called wind, then you should be able to figure out that using leaf blowers is a farce—no matter if you do it yourself or hire someone else.
    Yes, leaf blowers do a great job moving leaves off your paved driveway and they get leaf debris out of cracks between sections of your sidewalk. Their design is apparently so specialized, consumer websites actually go into details about the advantages and disadvantages of flat versus round nozzles. But what happens when the wind shifts, no matter if you have the latest, greatest “venturi-effect cone nozzle” or not?
    And let’s not forget the irritation factor of leaf blowers. I live out in the country in rural North Carolina and can’t even see my neighbors’ houses on the other side of our property. Yet I absolutely despise one of those neighbors. Why? At first light every Sunday morning from mid-September through the end of November, they run their leaf blower for more than an hour. They are on the east side of a 20-acre plot of oak-hickory-maple forest and the prevailing winds come from the west. Seriously, what is the point?

3. Burn them: HELL NO!! Do we even need to talk about how bad an idea this is? Yes, it gets rid of leaves, but what else does it do? It creates air pollution, and every autumn it starts hundreds if not thousands of brush fires and full-blown disastrous forest fires. Of course, if you burn down the trees you don’t have to worry about leaves for a few years, so maybe that is the logic? Leaf burning is just a really bad idea; don’t go there.

4. Bag ’em and trash ’em: MAYBE. If you live in an enlightened locale with a service that picks up bagged leaves and makes mulch of them instead of hauling them to a landfill, then this actually isn’t a horrible idea. It is still a bad idea—due to the cost, which your ever-increasing taxes pay, and because you could mulch them at home if you weren’t so lazy—but at least it isn’t as awful as pointlessly overflowing a community landfill.

5. Mow them: YES. As noted in a previous article about “green” lawn care, I am not a fan of using horsepower to mow grass unless you use a real horse. If you have a power mower, however, you might at least partially justify its existence by mowing your leaves. You can chop them with a manual or “reel” mower, which I have proven over the past 40 years of using one, but I will be the first to admit it takes some real effort. The days I mow leaves with a manual mower are days I do not go for a long run.
    If you must use your gas-guzzling, pollution-producing, noise-making contraption, then use it to chop your leaves and leave the pieces where they lie. The natural leaf nutrition you utilize on your lawn is the chemical fertilizer you don’t have to buy.

6. Mulch them: YES! If you have an area where you want to curtail weed growth, such as a garden path or along a rock wall, then put your leaves there. Use wet leaves or spray them down as you put them in place. Layers of large interlocked leaves work best because they are almost as impermeable as landscaping fabric until they begin to break down by decaying. By that time, however, it will be next fall, and you will have more leaves to add.

7. Compost them: YES, YES! Lawn care “experts” will try to sell you on their services by telling you that dried winter leaves are high in carbon and low in nitrogen and are therefore damaging to your lawn. They also preach the need to get rid of grass clippings because they are so high in nitrogen they damage your lawn. So you can shell out big bucks to hire someone to “save” your yard from itself, or you can apply a little logic.
    If you mow and leave your grass clippings during warm weather, then chop your leaves and leave them in the fall, it usually balances out. If you want to get fancy about it, set aside an area to save your grass clippings, and mix in your leaves in the fall. Using two to three parts leaves to one part grass clippings seems to work best, at least it has for me the past 40 years. About the only thing you have to be careful about is adding a little water here and there to keep the mix “perking” and don’t allow a blanket of large leaves to get inter-layered to the point they act as mulch instead of compost.

Enjoy the fall season! And the leaves. And remember: raking is great exercise.
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Editor’s note: motomynd is not a lawn care expert and doesn’t even play one on TV. In his spare time he does, however, maintain a six-acre wildlife refuge that just manages to meet city ordinances, and he does it without irrigation or chemicals, using only hand tools, a manual push mower, a battery-powered string trimmer, an electric chainsaw, and a little logic.
    And we apologize for not providing those bona fides by way of announcing “First Saturday Green 101” in October.
Copyright © 2012 by motomynd