Taking Control of Your Fall Leaves: What to Do With Them

Those Plant Ladies

In one of our recent blog posts, we talked all the good and bad that comes when those gorgeous orange and gold leaves come tumbling down in the fall. You can check it out here. How do we balance the good and bad of these fall leaves? We want to get them off our lawns and landscape plants so they can soak up all the sunlight possible but we don’t always need to remove them from our property entirely.

First, you’ll need to decide how you actually want to move and/or collect your leaves. Depending on the size of your property and the amount of leaves you’re dealing with you may choose anything from a simple metal or plastic rake all the way to a professional-grade, gas-powered, backpack blower, from simple yard waste trash can to large tarps. We’ll get into all the details about these different kinds of tools in another post but, for now, let’s start with all the options for what can actually be done with the leaves on your property.

There are a lot of choices when it comes to handling fall leaves. Before we dive into them, remember that, if you have diseased leaves or other material, the answer is always to get rid of them entirely. If your municipality offers leaf removal, do that. If you have to bag them and haul them off, do that. Whatever you do, don’t keep them anywhere near a place where you don’t want more disease to happen.

Autumn leaves falling in a wooded area; from the Those Plant Ladies blog post titled, Taking Control of Your Fall Leaves: What to Do With Them.

With that in mind, let’s start with what to do when you have more than one or two leaves flying around but you also aren’t completely drowning in them.

If you are dealing with leaves on your lawn, use a mulching mower to chop the leaves up and leave them on the lawn. Think of this as a free fertilizer and compost for your lawn and its soil. A mulching mower will finely chop up the leaves, allowing them to fall beneath the grass blades and keep them from blocking out the sunlight. If you don’t have a ton of leaves, this is our favorite option! Note: This may not be the best option if you have a freshly seeded lawn. You’ll want to give those new grass babies the very best chance to get established immediately after planting.

Just a few autumn leaves falling over a grassy area; from the Those Plant Ladies blog post titled, Taking Control of Your Fall Leaves: What to Do With Them.

Collect the leaves and add them to a compost pile. Fallen leaves are a great addition to your compost pile. They break down really easily, they don’t involve the risk of having weed seeds in them like grass clippings, and they provide a great source of browns to balance the greens from your kitchen scraps. Compost that has a lot of leaf litter in it really does make a very nice compost product that you can incorporate into your soil or use as a mulch on top of the soil.

RELATED: Compost 101

A huge pile of autumn leaves in a yard; from the Those Plant Ladies blog post titled, Taking Control of Your Fall Leaves: What to Do With Them.

Blow or rake the leaves into natural areas or other planting beds where they can stay and break down over time. If your property has a wooded area adjacent to it or you have some landscape beds where the leaves can be blown under or behind shrubs or trees, this is a great option. This is really what happens in nature. Leaves fall in the forests and are left to break down on the ground among the understory trees and shrubs, providing nutrients to the soil while providing all of the great benefits of an organic mulch. If you have areas on your property where you can aesthetically tolerate allowing the leaves to collect and break down, your landscape and the ecosystem (those overwintering insects included) around you will be very grateful!

RELATED: Benefits of Mulch

Autumn leaves covering a forest area; from the Those Plant Ladies blog post titled, Taking Control of Your Fall Leaves: What to Do With Them.

So what should you do if you are dealing with A LOT of leaves in your landscape? We’re talking so thick you can’t see the grass anymore, you’ve lost track of your shrubs, the whole nine yards! You should, for sure, get to where you can see that lawn and those plants again. You’ll want to invest in a bit more than a rake at this point. We definitely recommend a gas-powered, backpack blower for moving lots of leaves, especially potentially wet leaves off of large lawns. However, you may find some benefit in having a second, smaller blower for clean-ups like blowing off the sidewalks or patio. There are a lot of great handheld, battery-powered options out there for this type of work. But we promised tools in another post so we’ll come back to that.

Autumn leaves mostly covering a yard; from the Those Plant Ladies blog post titled, Taking Control of Your Fall Leaves: What to Do With Them.

PRO TIP: All this leaf blowing and raking that comes with fall leaf drop and reminds us why it is so important to get your new grass seed spread before the majority of leaves start falling. You’re going to want that grass to be well-rooted and able to stand up to 140+ mph winds that come from your blowers. We can’t have all that new seed being blown away when we come to take care of our leaves. Need to know how to get your lawn straight for the fall? We’ve got your covered with our 5 Steps to a Luscious, Thriving Lawn.

Using your tool of choice, remove the majority of the leaves from your lawn and landscape plants. Yes, use that leaf blower on your shrubs to blow the leaves right out of there! Here’s what you can do with those leaves once you’ve removed them:

Autumn leaves being moved from the yard with a leaf-blower; from the Those Plant Ladies blog post titled, Taking Control of Your Fall Leaves: What to Do With Them.

You can let them decompose on the property, using some of the options mentioned above; you’ll just need more space. If you want to compost them, you’ll need more space for composting. If you want to let them decompose on the ground, you’ll need a bit more natural space to put them. It’s not a great idea to try to mow over huge amounts of leaves with a mulching mower, there will still just be too many leaves. However, if you can get most of them out of the way, you can definitely mulch up any remaining bits that you weren’t able to collect as easily.

Figure out how to dispose of them. If it’s at all possible, avoid using plastic trash bags. There’s just so much waste involved when you bag up all that natural fertilizer and send it and the plastic trash bags to the landfill. Some municipalities will allow you to pile them loose by the curb and they come to collect them with their giant leaf vacuums. Others may have yard waste trash bins where the waste can be put in without bags and collected separately from your regular trash. If you have to go this route, it’s better than the bags.

Autumn leaves with rakes over top; from the Those Plant Ladies blog post titled, Taking Control of Your Fall Leaves: What to Do With Them.

At the end of the day, do your best to find somewhere that your leaves can stay on your property to break down whether you chop them up with a mower, put them in a big pile to compost, or just put them in a natural area to decompose. This is so beneficial to the planet and to your landscape. It’s important to let your landscape plants get the sun they need but the goodness of those leaves shouldn’t be overlooked. Give them a chance to replenish your soils and provide shelter for the other good creatures in the world. If you are really swimming in leaves, do what you need to do to get rid of them. But maybe keep just a few for good luck! Or something like that 😉

Happy fall!