You may have heard the phrase “Leave the leaves!” It’s become very popular in the past few years, as this awareness is spreading.
After a hurricane is a perfect time to start putting this into practice! If you have an oak tree or other tree in your yard, please just let the leaves stay!
If you’d like, you can rake them into a nice neat circle under the tree. And then for extra definition, you can add a border around the circle of leaves, using bricks or rocks if you have them, or else make a rustic circular border using the downed branches of the tree. It’s a beautiful way to keep valuable organic matter on site.
it’s really sad to walk around after a storm seeing bags and bags and bags of leaves lined up on the sidewalk as far as the eye can see. All those big plastic bags going into landfill, ugh!
And then on the other side of the sidewalk, some poor tree has the ground scraped bare under it. It’s better for the tree if we leave a circle around it, that has the leaves remaining and is free of mowing.
A tree’s own leaves are the best mulch for a tree! Totally cost-free, how cool is that!
Also, as we’ve been learning from the “leave the leaves” memes, leaf litter supports insects such as caterpillars that are an essential protein source for baby birds. And of course, the caterpillars that don’t get eaten grow up to be butterflies! Win win!
Also, when we don’t scrape the ground and mow it super tight, the ground has a much higher capacity for absorbing stormwater.
Be lazy! Slack off for Mother Earth! Leave the leaves!