Mulching Leaves & Why it Helps
When it comes to leaf season, most homeowners send their leaves to the street to be picked up and hauled away. What if there was a different way of dealing with your leaves which cost less money and was more beneficial to your yard and ecosystem.
When fall comes around the corner, we tend to think of the pretty colors on the trees, the cooler weather, the beginning of the holiday season, football, and pumpkins. But, at the end of it all and the reason it’s called fall is because of the leaves dropping to the ground. Our yards begin to become harder and harder to navigate and especially when it rains our covered walkways, paths, decks, and driveways become slippery. Most homeowners who have bigger yards with lots of trees call up a local business that are able to come by with their leaf vacuums and suck up all the leaves and be on their way. These services can be extremely expensive and, in some cases, robbing your yard of key nutrients. Leaves carry nutrients such as nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, which are essential for prime soil growth. Leaves have been used for hundreds of years as a way to produce excellent microbiome efficiency, erosion prevention, and overall sustainability. They help lightning bugs and other critters burrow into the ground and reproduce for the next year. They are slowly dying off, and this may be the last generation to see them, and the biggest culprit is chemical fertilizers.
Many homeowners have gone with these commercial businesses that fertilize their lawns and although they do a great job for the grass, most of the products are chemicals and at best may have been derived from natural means, but not truly from the source. These products balance and nourish the soil and creates an environment that the grasses can grow fully, but at what cost? The critters and animals that have lived in these yards and properties have been pushed out or killed by these chemical fertilization options, which leaves the ecosystem unbalanced. I am sure everyone learned in elementary school about the life/ecosystem cycle and remember that if things are out of whack, it’s not good for anyone involved. We need to revert back to the original methods; this isn’t to say that we cannot use new technology or more efficient tools/machines to help with fertilization, but that we need to use sustainable practices that benefit everyone.
I am sure when reading through the above paragraphs, you probably thought, where is the info about actually mulching leaves, well here it is. Mulching leaves is a process of mowing over leaves multiple times and it breaks them down into small bits that fall in between the grass and becomes nutrients that the soil needs to stay balanced. This happens over time when it rains and dries and rains and dries, breaking down the leaf bits till they become soil like. This process is healthy for the lawns and instead of taking time to blow the leaves to the street or bagging them, you or a lawncare specialist simply mows over the leaves and no transporting required. For the best results, you are going to want to go with a mower that has mulching blades and a mower that doesn’t shoot the leaves out immediately so it can continue to break the leaves down into bits. I have used a traditional mower with regular blades and a chute, and it works fine, yet you just have to go over the leaves more times so it can break down small enough to get into the soil.
At the end of the day, using natural means is the best way to keep our ecosystems balanced and provide our lawns with the key nutrients needed to grow healthily.
