This time of the year is when landscape contractors stop pretending they are mowing lawns around here (grass at most places pretty much stopped growing a couple of weeks ago) and begin the great weekly leaf round up filling the area with the joyous sound of leaf blowers all day long.
A few towns have started to ban gas powered leaf blowers, which should make the purchase of them a great bargain if the towns start to enforce the bans. It would also make neighborhoods a good deal more peaceful during what is a truly beautiful time of the year in our region of many maples.
What I donāt understand is the need to remove leaves on a weekly basis when the trees are still holding many leaves- that is the need of the homeowner. I fully appreciate the need of the landscape contractor, who may have run out of work to keep his crew busy.
Why is this in the fruit growing topic? Because you are my people here and many of you know the value of shredded leaves as a mulch or composted leaves for many purposes including mulching establishing fruit trees. Or spreading their compost as a top layer when transplanting or mixing with really bad soil to make it adequate.
Perhaps some of you gather falling leaves repeatedly because you want to capture as many as you can to utilize them, maybe not.
What I do is stop mowing my lawn in mid-Sept so it is springy and tall enough not to be bothered by a leaf crown that never really smothers the grass anyway when you donāt mow it close going into fall- most of the leaves get blown to the lawns edge or build up where there are obstacles that capture them, like a shrub fenceā¦ These captured leaves donāt bother me, but it does feel good to clean the grounds of them in spring when I do my annual leaf round-up just once.
Under my fruit trees I stop mowing during summer so more water is pulled out of the soil to hopefully increase brix in our humid climate. Thatās where I mow in early fall just to blow the cover of my voles and give my hawks as Autumn treat.
My father used to accept enormous mounds of leaves dumped at his place that we would spread like a foot deep or more in his big vegetable garden. He had incredibly friable soil and a super productive garden.
I use a mulching mower. I never blow or rake leaves.
Soon my neighborhood will be drowning in the noise of 2 stroke engines ostensibly with the goal maintaining the landscape. And they will remove every single leaf around every bush and tree.
The same neighbors will have landscapers bringing in truckloads of mulch in spring to protect the soil and act as ground cover.
Meanwhile I have deep rich soil well over a foot deep because I donāt remove leaves during the fall.
Iām somewhere in the middle. I bag the leaves until the apple and pear trees have stopped dropping leaves. Then the leaves (mostly maple) get dumped in the garden and tilled under. After almost 30 years the soil is nice and rich. When I first moved I used to go to the YMCA and pick up their bagged leaves and till in. I pick up straw bales after Halloween to mulch around trees.
The only danger of putting leaves in the garden is if you go overboard you will create muck soil, which is fine for lettuce, onions and col crops (if you mound your soil high) but not so much for peppers, eggplants or tomatoes, at least on rainy years.
While we are discussing this- yes i collect leaves and mulchā¦ also this time of year and onward i can get woodchips fairly easily due to canopy cutting. Im a mulcherā¦ but im questioning why I do. I reckon because i see others doing it. Also this time of year folks are painting tree trunksā¦ the best scientific or university info i can find is that it helps protect rootstocks from herbicide. Other than that it seems to be some kind of things folks doā¦ because there is a picture or video of someone else that did it.
I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a university or somewhat scientific study on mulchingā¦ the best that i came up with was a recommendation to mulch young fruit trees when plantingā¦ to keep the weeds at bay. Other than that not so much. Sure there are influencers and experts that say to do it. But why dont orchards do it? Why dont they paint trunks?
I also dabbled a little and looked at pics of orchards in my state and a few surrounding statesā¦ didnt see any painted trunks or mulching really.
It does feel good to mulchā¦ and im probably going to paint my trunks but it does seem strange that my little orchards need it and commerical orchards dont.
I see folks raking alreadyā¦ i saw a guy with a nice expensive kubota mower sucking up all the leaves as he mowedā¦ he wants them GONE out of his yard! He dumps those bags in the creek as if they will ruin his yard. Soon folks will be posting on social medias asking for people to rake their leaves. They want them GONE.
My local big city encourages people to bag their leaves and they send trucks to pick them up and they make mulch out of them with a big machine. I got about 20 tons of it and spread it. Wow it really made the weird and aggravating weeds grow really good.
There is no evidence really that i have spread about 50 tons of woodchips and 20 tons of leaf mulch let alone hundreds of bags of leaves. If you visited my plantings you would call me a liar. Its gone for the most part. Very little sign left that i have spread woodchips. And zero sign of any past spreading of leaves.
Final thought- im probably supposed to discard all of my prunings of my fruit trees and berriesā¦ either by burning or removing them altogether due to this or that disease or pest. But i use them. I have been laying them down in areas of land that i give to pollinators. So far im happy with it. I toss native wildflower seeds in those areas and i notice that birds scurry about in them. I think bees and probably snakes find their ways into them. The snow pushes them down and i guess they make mulch for the seeds. Stuff grows really well in that discarded trimmings for me. Maybe its wrong to do but its working for me.
I pick or rake up all fallen leaves from my 9 fruit trees on a 50 ft city lot on the supposition that this will suppress the spread of leaf disease. This is done all year-round, and the leaves are buried in the vegetable garden about a foot deep along with vegetable, pruning, and kitchen waste. No natural organic matter is thrown away. Iāve done this for years, and the sandy/gravely garden soil keeps improving.
Of course, the many benefits of mulch are common knowledge in horticulture with many centuries of anecdotal observations of how it improves soil tilth and nutrient availability. It isnāt something that is questioned so probably doesnāt inspire a great deal of time and money researching it. A lot of recent research has been primarily about water retention which is becoming increasingly important globally.
Incidentally, Iāve seen many commercial orchards with painted trunks, but it was done primarily to prevent sunburn. I have seen a study of paint reducing borer attacks on peaches and apples, but it was years ago. I am not going to try to search it up right now, but the study was done at Cornell. They also did a study of the affect of ten years of heavy mulching of an apple orchard
with woodchips. The trees got a little too healthy and vigorous. That probably reduced brix, but the concern in the article was the requirement for more pruning.
At my old place I used a backpack blower on my leaves, but would do the whole yard in one session fter they had all dropped. Id work them into rows then rake those onto a big tarp and drag them into my leaf pen next to the compost heap. It was about 20 x 4 x 4 feet. Id pack the leaves down and fill it to overflowing. I used the leaves as a brown. I never managed to use them all in a season, and by the time the next fall had rolled around they would breakdown on their own, going from 5 feet high to less than five inches. I need to establish a similar system here.
Ive tried a few thingsā¦ the leaf mulch that i talked about earlier from the big city that uses the big machine. That stuff smelled like Skoal snuffā¦ very wintergreenish. It was hot to the touch when i dumped itā¦ and steamed for days. That stuff still grows amazing weeds where i spread it. I edged my blackberry rows with itā¦ coincidentally my blackberry plants are all very healthy still. But i do have to weedeat those edges more than any other place that i have.
I have ran my forest leaves thru my wood chipper and made leaf dust. I put that in my walkways of my orchard. Really made the walkways flourish with clovers. I think it helped.
Leaf Mould- I bag my forest leaves and poke holes in 50 gallon bags so that rain and air and stuff can happen. I forget about them for 1 year. That stuff smells like wet dog. I put it on my garlic beds and it seems to work. My garlic is amazing.
I have spread leaves randomly thru the walkways and just let nature do its thing all late fall and winterā¦ then in the spring whatever is left i mow onto the trees whatever leaf litter is left along with the fresh spring grasses. Thats probably the easiest and most profitable as far as nutrients go for me.
I reckon it would be nice to have a reverse working mower that i would put all my leaves into a contraption and it would shred and blow leaves everywhereā¦ instead of the leaf vacuums like everyone wants. But that would be silly.
I shred all the leaves I can collect and use as mulch in the garden. To shred them I use shredder/wood chipper. There are some rules to successful shredding without need to unscrew 16 bolts to clear the clogs and without tons of dust blowed to your face. The leaves have to be fresh. Keep them on the ground- they either get too wet or too dry depending on the weather and then you have either clogs or dust. So I try to collect leaves as soon as I have time to shred them. To my excuse, I do not have gas blower. Electric or rake. But chipper is gas powered and loud. Sorry, neighbors!
I did this too for many years. Our town collected bagged leaves. Iād drive around picking up bags before the town trucks arrived, then dump the leaves in my vegetable garden. In spring, Iād plant through the leaves, using the leaves as a mulch. By August, the leaves were mostly gone, transformed into humus. I had unbelievably good soil.
Now I collect leaves and grass clippings in a corner of the yard and compost them there. Then as needed I move the compost to the veggies, berries.
Does anyone here compost or mulch their pine needles? My new place has a lot of white pine. Ive heard it makes the soil more acidic, so maybe adding some calcium carbonate to the finished product would help?
The idea that pine needles measurably acidify soil has been pretty much debunked and they are an excellent mulch, IMO, as long as you donāt need your mulch to store much water. I believe that rotting wood chips store a lot of water that is drawn into the soil by capillary pull. Pine needles will reduce evaporation but not function as much of a reservoir.
Compost here usually makes soil less acid. The top layer of soil richer in OM is generally more alkaline than the less dark layer below.
Iāve overdone it with mulch, itās possible, but still fairly harmless. Inhibited early spring warmup in my cool Rocky Mountain climate I thought. (I was anxious to beat the drought going on then and I had my pickup truck and access to free chips from the city.)
So Iāve laid off it since then. Soil looks great now that itās fully decomposed.
I sort of resumed the practice by throwing a shovel full of Urea-decomposed chips on each tree once a week during growing season. I spiked my pile of wood chips with a witchās brew of micronutrients derived from a soil test on the compost.
A soil test revealed I got the micronutrients exactly right but an excess of P,K, and probably N. So I stopped again.
That said, leaf mold/mulch is way better than mere wood chip stuff. I suspect that the tree roots get down to some esoteric micronutrients . Around here autumn leaves arenāt so plentiful so you have to grind them yourself. Electric weed eater in a clean plastic garbage container works great. About like operating a coffee grinder.
Painting trunks seems to be a very common practice in Colorado to prevent āsouthwest injuryā aka freeze/thaw cracking of the trunk. Iāve seen it sporadically in fruit tree orchards in Western NY.
And just because itās likely to come up at some point-- sometimes youāll hear that mulch can āsuck upā all the nutrients creating a nitrogen deficiency. There is truth to this as microbes are much better are breaking down high C/N ratio materials like wood chips than plants are, but itās a temporary effect and very limited spatially (top couple inches of soil maybe and plant roots go much deeper).
Alanās point about leaf mulch having a much lower C/N ratio than woodier materials is worth underlining too. Just remember this can benefit weeds and microbes just as much as your plants.
I used to rake and bag my leaves when in lived on my quarter acre lot with big trees in Louisville to avoid the stink eye from neighbors with their nicely raked lots. Then I thought to myself that I was just sending nutrients away in expensive lawn bags and then buying nutrients to fertilize my lawn. So I stopped raking and bagging and just started mowing over the leaves until they were shredded enough to break down quickly and not really be visible too much on the lawn. Less work and free fertilizer.
Now that I am in a very rural area and have acres to mow, I just run whatever leaves the wind does not get to first over with the mower, including under the orchard trees.
When I first planted my trees, I mulched around them with layers of compost and wood chips just to keep the soil moist and help get them going. However, after a couple of years, I just let grass/weeds grow right up to the trunks and just mow under them on my little zero turn radius mower. One can get quite close to the trunk, but I do have to bend my head down to avoid giving myself a concussion on a low-hanging branch or poking my eye out on a stubby limb, both of which have almost happened on occasion. The trees seem healthy and grow faster than I want, so I will just mow the leaves and grass under them and continue my lazy method. Once or twice a year, I will just trim the tiny little circle of grass/weeds around the tree trunk just because it looks scruffy. Not sure if it does anything any good or not.
I have some new raised beds and bought a 9 cubic yard dump truck load of topsoil/compost mix and had it delivered yesterday. Almost died when I saw it cost almost 600 dollars. That is the most expensive load of anything I have ever bought. So I have determined I will go to the edge of my woods and rake a bunch of leaves onto a tarp and drag them to my raised beds and dump a bunch in each bed to let them start decomposing over the winter and to stretch that load of brown gold that I just bought a little farther.
I hope the use of the leaves whole will not pose too much of a problem because I just donāt have it in my old body to shred all those leaves first. Iām counting on nature to do her part just as she does on the forest floor.
Sandra
I was once parked in a shopping plaza next to a small bank. The "landscaping"around the bank was a weakly growing lawn about 40 by 40 feet square, period. Suddenly a truck pulled up and three ālandscapersā with gas leafblowers jumped out and spent at least 20 minutes circling the bank, raising hell. I did not notice who won the fight over the few leaves they found, or if they just relayed the leaves around the bank for a while, along with all the dust. I had worked for landscapers when I was young and I recognized that make-work days exist, but it would seem to be a better business strategy to volunteer the workers to clean up a public area or the yards of old folks and just get a bit of good will instead of pretending to have a purpose for all the disruption.
