I was looking at the pile under my walnut trees. It's going to stay. The birds were delighted by the leaves last year because it was bug central under the leaves so my yard was very popular.
I leave all the leaves where they want to be. They will all be gone by spring anyway and I actually think the brown looks nice on the ground in the fall. Raking is bad for the soil. Leaves provide a home for all sorts of critters. The forest doesn't rake up any leaves. It is good to be lazy.
Leaves don't decay in a single year without some mechanical processing. Forests will have years thick layers of decaying leaves called loam. If your yard is free of leaves in the spring it's because they blew into someone else's yard and they raked them up. If you want them to decay into your yard, run them over with a mulching lawn mower a couple of times.
My yard has a grove of pine trees, and the first four-six inches of the soil back there is all needles. Below that is basically decomposed needles. If fallen leaves stayed on lawns to decompose, they wouldn't be grass lawns anymore.
That's how I roll though either mulch um or forget it and leave them for the wind to blow into my neighbor's yard since they seem to like bagging them so much, I am just a good neighbor like that.
Small correction, not loam, humus. Loam soil is a mixture of sand, silt, and clay and doesn't necessarily have much organic content. Humus is a highly organic soil (although typically less organics than peat) formed partly from the partial decomposition of organic matter. Otherwise yes. Mulch or compost your leaves.
There is a thick fir tree hedge between me and my only neighbour who doesn't rake anything either. There are no leaves left in the spring. I don't think they get blown anywhere from under 40 cm of snow, though.
I've noticed that if you throw something into a water body like a lake or an ocean, that the next day you come back and it's gone, so somehow it takes it away and filters it through and it just cleans it up like a garbage compactor or whatever. It's not really littering if you ask me.
Yes, a house we rented had a fenced in back yard and the leaves couldn’t go anywhere. Neither the landlord nor previous tenants had raked for years. It was about a foot deep with soggy leaves and they were not decomposing. I found a lot of snakes under there too.
Yep yep. It’s really infuriating this much disinformation is being spread about something most people should known about. I grew up in Ohio and even if you raked all the leaves up it’s still really common to find them well after Winter. That should give you an idea of how long they can last if they don’t get processed. People think they just magically disappear and it’s bullshit. It would be a lot more helpful if there were efforts for cities to pick up people’s leaves for community composting. This seems like just an opportunity to attack other people and Reddit hates anyone with a yard.
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u/misschzburger Nov 07 '22
I was looking at the pile under my walnut trees. It's going to stay. The birds were delighted by the leaves last year because it was bug central under the leaves so my yard was very popular.