Use Those Fallen Leaves

[American Beauty Gardener]

By Cait Johnson, Assistant Producer, Care2 Healthy Living Channels.
(www.care2.com)

If you have trees on your property, it is inevitable that you'll soon
have fallen leaves to deal with at this time of year.
SIMPLE SOLUTION: When many of us were children, we loved to jump in
great piles of them, or enjoy the whiff of bitter smoke as our parents
and neighbors burned them--but now we don't want to add to the
pollution problem. So what on earth can we do with them?

Instead of seeing them as a back-breaking nuisance to rake, we can
think of fallen leaves as a great--and largely untapped--natural
resource that can be a real boon to gardeners and homeowners! Here are
some terrific uses for fallen leaves, some of which you never may have
thought of.

1. Compost
If you have room in your yard, you can make a nice big pile of whole
leaves that will eventually (in six months or so) turn into great
compost for your garden or potted plants, rich in the leaf mold that
is so filled with nutrients. If you don't have a lot of room for a big
leaf-pile, shredding your leaves will reduce their volume (and the
time it takes for them to break down) considerably. If you have a
kitchen-waste-and-grass-clippings compost pile, you can also save bags
of leaves for use during summer months to cover the sometimes-smelly
heap. (In the proper ratio, brown leaves combined with green
ingredients such as freshly-cut grass and vegetable scraps make for
great compost health. That ratio is usually 50 percent brown material
to 50 percent green, although 75 percent brown to 25 percent green is
optimum. Given the amount of scraps and grass we usually generate over
the course of a summer, fallen leaves become pretty important!) While
some sources say leaf-only piles may be left alone, it is generally
agreed that you should turn green-and-brown compost regularly to
aerate it.

For more on composting leaves, see Composting Fallen Leaves.

And for the composting basics, see Building a Compost Heap.

2. Mulch
You can simply rake medium-sized leaves (excluding any that appear
diseased) to cover garden beds and borders to a depth of several
inches. The leaves will eventually break down, providing protection
and nutrients, as well as a happy home for the worms that are so
beneficial to our garden soil. Larger leaves will require shredding
first.

3. Insulation
One autumn, several of us met at a friend's house to help her rake
leaves, gathering them into plastic bags that we then stacked around
her partially-exposed exterior basement wall and in the crawl space
underneath the cottage that was also on her property. We made a party
of it, and she reported that the leafy insulation really saved on
heating bills!

Leaves also provide a quick-and-easy way to protect containers from
frost: Simply surround the pots with bags of leaves.