A 3-minute service announcement to
It’s autumn and it’s time for football, pumpkin spice, and falling leaves. When those leaves start to pile up, you may head straight to the garage, grab your rake, and spend the afternoon making piles. There is a better way to manage the leaves, save time, and improve
Before we start, it is important you do something with your leaves, unless you do not have any trees. Fallen leaves eventually smother and kill your grass. They also do nothing to improve your relationship with your neighbor. For everyone’s sake, take the time to properly care for your lawn. The good news: If you follow this suggestion, it will not take much time and your lawn will look even better than raking.
Instead of a rake, grab your lawnmower and just run over those leaves and let the blades do the work. Chopping leaves with your mower cuts them into millions of pieces and reduces their volume by over 90%. The ground pieces fall into the soil which prepares them to decompose over the winter. Grinding is better than raking for 3 huge reasons. So, let’s talk about it. Then, head to the garage for your lawnmower and skip the rake.
Feed Your Lawn
Leaves are comprised of minerals your trees use to grow, including nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and calcium plus many other trace amounts of minerals. Your trees pull these minerals out of the ground and use them during the growing season to flourish.
When these leaves fall, the minerals are still present and create a great fall feeding for your soil. Grinding the leaves into little pieces makes them the perfect size for earthworms and other insects to consume and break down. This decomposition process returns the minerals to the soil and readies it for the following spring.
Save Time and Effort
Grabbing your lawnmower and grinding your leaves takes much less time than raking leaves into piles and putting them into bags. Bags are difficult to hold open and fill. Then, you have to haul all of those bags to the curb for the trash. It’s time-consuming, dirty, and frustrating work. To me, it is almost as frustrating as working with Christmas lights.
I would do just about anything to avoid raking. Using the lawn mower lets you skip the effort and get the job done in the same amount of time it takes to mow your lawn. Just set your mower deck at reasonable height and run over the leaves once or maybe twice. Then, leave them there for nature to decompose.
In addition to less work in the fall, you will also have less work next year. The leaves fertilize your soil and feed your lawn during warm stretches of the winter. Your grass will be ready to go in the spring without fertilizer and you should have less room and bare patches for the weeds to start.
Spare the Landfills
Once the trash person picks up those bags, they are headed to the landfill. Just like with recycling, plastic bags not only do not break down in the landfill, but they also prevent their contents from being broken down properly. The leaves that would completely decompose over the winter if they are ground up will last for years in a plastic bag in a landfill.
Plastic bags of leaves are not going to over-crowd the landfill, but it is also not going to help the situation either. One piece of cake won’t ruin your life, but at the same time, it will not be beneficial for you to lose weight. You get the idea. The less we throw out, the longer we can sustain our land.
To Bag or Not To Bag, that’s Decomposition
Remember when people used to bag grass? I do and then some genius invented mulching blades and everyone switched over. When you cut grass or leaves into a billion pieces, you can allow nature to do
Grind up your leaves and get back to fun, fall activities, like tailgating, carving pumpkins, or taking a drive to look at other people’s leaves.
If You Still Prefer to Bag…
Listen, if you want to get rid of your leaves, please do this: Rake and gather them up and dump them into your compost pile or take them to a composting facility. Better yet, maybe you have a friend that will compost them for you. I do and it’s a fun reason for a visit. Take care.
