With fall almost here it’s time to start thinking about gardening chores and the task that most people have to do in some way is deal with the leaves. What do you do with the leaves is an important question. For way too long many people have burned them which to me is the worst possible way to dispose of unwanted leaves. Please DON’T ever burn the leaves! Often the leaf burners will use additives like gasoline to help the leaves catch on fire (like they really need any help!) In this post I compiled a list of 10 GREAT things to do with your fall leaves!
The Best Ways to Use Fall Leaves in the Garden
- Use leaves as mulch in your garden beds. Simply gather them up and place them on your garden beds. The leaves will break down over time. In the spring rake up what is remaining to plant your gardens and put the leftover leaves in your compost bins.
- Mow your leaves over into small bits and let them replenish the soil of your lawn. The shedded leaves will help provide nutrients to improve your soil oer time. Make sure there are no large pieces of leaves that will kill off your grass.
- Toss them in the compost bin to make compost! You can never have enough compost and those leaves will break down very quickly in a hot compost bin. You may even need to gather your neighbors leaves to get more material for your compost bins!
- Prepare new beds by incorporating the shredded leaves into the soil either by tilling or double digging. Incorporating the leaves is simply composting in place.
- Create new garden beds with newspapers then cover with leaves to kill the grass and weeds underneath.
- Bag the shredded leaves in black plastic bags and poke holes in the bags then add a little moisture. By spring you should have some great leaf mold compost.
If you don’t use them in your garden give them to someone who does! Gardeners love leaves!
Creative Uses for Leaves
- Collect the leaves and save them by flattening them underneath a book or use a leaf press. They can make some beautiful art pieces!
- Use the leaves to make textured stepping stones or garden art. Just make the stones as you would normally but press a variety of leaves into the surface. Any leaf with a strong veining pattern will work. You may have to scrape the leaves off after the cement dries.
- After drying and flattening the leaves use them for stencils on your walls and art projects.
- Photograph the pictures and make prints for decorating your home during the fall.
Leaves are a great resource for gardening so don’t waste them. I also will say this, many beneficial insects nest in the leaves for over wintering. To support those insects you may want to consider leaving some areas with the leaves in place and not disturbed.
You have been thorough! I am going to try the bagged leaves with a holes this year Dave…one can never have too much leaf mold! Gail
I love all my neighbors extra leaves and actually I think they like me for getting them too:)
I only have water oak. The leaves are very small. They are hard to rake up. Will they work?
Lots of good ideas for the use of leaves besides putting in bags at the curb.
Gail,
It’s a cheap and easy way to compost! You can do it with grass clippings or other garden waste also.
Tina,
I with my neighbors would give me their leaves. Nice presents for fall!
Lola,
The leaves should work for all the composting type of activities. I don’t know about the more creative side, but I bet they would work for some of them also!
We shred ours and put them in the compost pile. We also gather those of our older neighbors behind us. They have a lot of Willow Oak, and those leaves stay pliable, so they don’t shred or break down well. But we take them anyway. I’ll try the bag method on those, thanks! And here in Howard County, Maryland, we don’t have any fall color to speak of yet.
Hi Dave, great ideas on the things to do and also the fall blogger project. It will be mid October when the best color gets started. Who knows what the drought will do to the colors this year, but there should be some worth adding to your meme. We don’t have a lot of leaves except for one semi large maple near the house that drops very late, after Thanksgiving. I think it is a silver maple. I have an electric blower/vac that chops them up and I spread them on the flower beds as is. I would love to have more leaves and some of our neighbors even bag theirs, but they also put yucky stuff in the bags, so I don’t want them. We have put leaves into all of our concrete step stones, vein side down does best. They just weather away, you don’t have to try and get them out once the concrete cures.
Frances
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What creative things to do with leaves. I’m going to use mine as compost.
Great ideas on how to use leaves Dave. I usually mulch some of them into my lawn, rake some of them into the beds for winter to act as mulch, & compost the majority.