Sustainable and Creative Ways to Use Autumn Leaves
Each autumn, trees shed their leaves, covering yards and gardens with a colorful blanket. While it may be tempting to simply bag them up and throw them away, there are many practical, eco-friendly, and creative ways to use fallen leaves. Keeping leaves out of landfills helps reduce methane emissions, lowers pollution from gas-powered yard tools, and combats climate change. Research has shown that plastic bags filled with leaves can last for years in the landfill.
Here are some ideas for making the most of this seasonal abundance.
1. Mulch Your Garden
Shredded leaves make excellent mulch for flower beds, vegetable gardens, and around shrubs and trees. To use leaves as mulch, simply run a lawn mower over the pile to shred them and spread a layer around your plants. This helps retain moisture, suppress weeds, and enrich the soil as they decompose. They can also improve aeration and drainage to clay soils or add water and nutrient-holding capacity to sandy soils. The mulch will break down over the winter, enriching the soil and making spring planting easier. Steps to mulch leaves:
- Use a rotary mower for leaf mulching, but not a stump grinder or chipper/shredder.
- Inspect the area and remove sticks and limbs before mulching to reduce the chance that you or someone else could be hurt by flying debris.
- Wear safety goggles and an air mask over your mouth and nose to protect yourself from debris and dust.
- Mulching moist leaves minimizes dust concerns, but if leaves are too wet, it increases the strain on your mower’s engine and does not chop the leaves into small pieces that easily decompose in the soil.
- Consider the limitations of the mower itself. Don’t try to mulch more than six inches of leaves at a time.
2. Start a Compost Pile
Leaves are a great source of “brown” material for composting. Mix them with “green” materials like grass clippings and kitchen scraps. Over time, the compost will break down into nutrient-rich humus, perfect for gardens and houseplants.
3. Insulate Tender Plants
Use dry leaves to insulate sensitive plants from cold weather. Pile leaves around the base of perennials or over root crops to help keep them warm during winter. Avoid using leaves from allelopathic plants (like black walnut (Juglans nigra) that may inhibit growth. This insulation provides:
- Temperature Regulation: Leaves trap heat and create a microclimate around the plants.
- Moisture Retention: They help retain soil moisture, reducing the need for frequent watering.
- Weed Suppression: A layer of leaves can prevent weed growth, benefiting the plants.
4. Provide Habitat for Wildlife
Think twice before you rake, mow, and blow this year. Leaves provide shelter for insects, amphibians, and small mammals, and help support a healthy ecosystem in your garden. Leave some fallen leaves in a quiet corner of your yard. Beneficial insects and microorganisms will thank you and benefit from the shelter the leaves provide as well as the nutrients they impart.
Where do you think insects and other invertebrates go in the winter? The vast majority “overwinter,” or spend winter, right where they spent all summer — just less active and more hidden. Leaf litter creates and maintains a stable, moist environment, which is ideal for insects like ants and beetles, as well as arthropods like pill bugs and centipedes. Many of these creatures rely on native leaf litter for egg laying sites, larval development, food, shelter, and protection from predators.
- Fireflies live the majority of their lives in fallen and decomposing leaves as larvae to hunt, feed, and seek shelter. Leaf removal is one of the main reasons why firefly populations have declined.
- Great spangled fritillary (Speyeria Cybele) and woolly bear caterpillars tuck themselves into leaf piles for protection from cold weather and predators. The wolly bear caterpillar is the larval stage of the Isabella tiger moth (Pyrrharctia isabella).
- Red-banded hairstreaks (Calycopis cecrops) lay their eggs on fallen oak leaves, which become the first food of the caterpillars when they emerge.
- Luna moths (Actias luna) and swallowtail butterflies (Papilionidae) disguise their cocoons and chrysalises as dried leaves, blending in with the “real” leaves.
- Bumble bees (Bombus) create nests in cavities underground, in trees, or in brush piles. They prefer abandoned rodent burrows. At the end of summer, mated queen bumble bees burrow only an inch or two into the earth to hibernate for winter. An extra thick layer of leaves is welcome protection from the elements.
- 30% of native bees are tunnel-nesting, such as leafcutter (Megachile) and mason bees (Osmia). These solitary-nesting species need narrow tunnels or other tiny spaces in dead wood, hollow stems, or brush piles.
- Yellow spotted millipede juveniles (Harpaphe haydeniana) eat humus, the rich organic layer of decayed plants and animal matter at the surface of the forest floor.
- Stick insects (Phasmatodea) drop more than 100 eggs from treetops that free-fall to the ground, where they overwinter in the leaf litter until spring. These eggs are disguised to look just like seeds. The ruse attracts ants, who take the seeds back to their nests and bury them, where the baby stick insects hatch safely beneath the soil.
Fallen leaves are also important for higher-order wildlife such as reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals.
- Forage: Birds, chipmunks, racoons, shrews, and many other animals forage for food (insects, arthropods, and seeds) and disperse seeds in fallen leaves.
- Shelter: Many species like the American toad (Anaxyrus americanus), least shrew (Cryptotis parva), and eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus), spend a large portion of their life in leaf litter, and use it as camouflage to help avoid predators.
- Nesting material: Squirrels, chipmunks, and several species of birds use leaf litter to build their nests. Ovenbirds build their nests in leaf litter layers on the ground.
- Overwintering: Many animals make burrows under layers of fallen leaves that help to insulate them and camouflage their entrances. Examples include the wood frog (Lithobates sylvatica) and the eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina) overwinter under leaf litter.
6. Use as Lawn Fertilizer
A thick layer of leaves can block sunlight, shading the turf and reducing growth, but mulching leaves with a lawnmower and leaving them in place is an easy and environmentally friendly solution. Leaves will quickly break down and return nutrients to the soil, improving lawn health. Leaves contain nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, which are vital for plant growth. But they are not a substitute for routine soil testing and proper fertilizer application.
Conclusion
Instead of seeing falling leaves as a chore, view them as a valuable natural resource. With these simple ideas, you can recycle autumn leaves to benefit your garden, wildlife, and the environment.
Additional Information Sources:
‘Leaf’ your lawn unraked this fall, turfgrass expert says | Virginia Tech News | Virginia Tech
FS1369: Why Leave the Leaves and How to Do it (Rutgers NJAES)
Leave the Leaves: Winter Habitat Protection | Xerces Society
