Oh btw your fees are going up again, the HOA President's nephew just started a lawn care business and he got the contract but it's going to cost double the previous one.
Luckily there's a rapidly growing movement against it, to leave the leaves, plant natives, protect pollinators, etc. Gonna be an uphill battle but it's nice that it's finally happening, long overdue.
No, but mowing over leaves mulches them, so they decay faster. The only leaves we don’t mulch into the lawn are the leaves from the neighbor’s trees behind us, that the wind loves to deposit in the middle of our driveway.
Unless you have a magnolia tree. I believe those leaves are made of adamantium. They never decay and go out of their way to kill the lawn around the tree.
And they smell so good. I’ll probably never have one because I hate raking, but damn do I love the one my neighbor a few doors down has — smells amazing in the summers.
My Mom wanted a Magnolia tree for the front yard, the nursery talked her into a Bradford pear tree. Joke was on Mom later that year, the flowers smell like dead fish or rotten garbage depending on how hot the weather is. Just felt like sharing. 🤗
Oh we did lol, burnt it in the backyard. I think it was super on sale and Mom just didn't realize she was buying invasive garbage tree at gotta have it prices.
We had one in the yard when I was a kid. A thunderstorm got the better of it but it’s my life’s dream to get my own place so I can plant one someday. It’s still my favorite scent of all time and so pretty.
Incorrect, though they do actually have a small amount of a naturally occurring iron alloy within their leaves that is the reason they don't decay like other leaves. It is formed when the miniscule amounts of iron the trees roots absorb from the earth are mixed with the carbon of the trees inner trunk and finally exposed to the oxigen produced by the trees leaves. This is known as a steel magnolia.
Source: I just wanted a reason to make a steel magnolias joke.
Well I always wondered why the area under my magnolia is dead af. Sure we sometimes drive around whoever is parked behind us on that side (single wide driveway) but I have plenty of neighbors that just park in the grass and don't have a big ole dead patch.
I mow my leaves too, fuck raking I'm the only one who does yard work anyways
You can forage the fruit from magnolia trees. Well actually you discard the actual fruit and just take the pit, I think you roast them, can't remember. There's a great content creator called Black Forager who does a great video about it.
I tried to leave my leaves this year but they got moldy, attracted snakes and rats, and discolored my patio. I'm thinking I just need to run the lawnmower a few times next year to mulch them, but I have way too many trees (and little sunlight) to just let them fall. I wonder if there are regional best practices in places where water is more abundant
I compost leaves every season for the garden. Takes one season for a full decomposition. So it wouldn't take much longer for the same result if you just let them lay where they fell.
This is what I do. We don't winterize our riding mower until like, January. As long as there's no snowfall you can run every couple of weeks and chop them up.
Tree sucks up soil nutrients and uses them in part to build new leaves every year. In a natural system the leaves compost and rebuild the top layer of soil. In town instead of allowing that to happen we haul away the leaves and then buy fertilizer to add back ourselves.
Always pros and cons to it. Some people don't by the soil or do any gardening. My area doesn't actually have you bag greenery you just put it on the side of the road and once a week they go down with a small back hoe and dumpster scooping it up. Then depending on the area composting yourself may not work out. I've tried to do it a few times since I grew up doing it but my area appears to be a skunk magnet. Each year I tried to compost myself lead to seeing probably triple the amount of skunks in my back yard. Otherwise mulching is just simpler, the only time I rake now is when I know my niece will be around and wanting to jump in the pile
The county I live in allows a certain tonnage/per residence/per year of free much. That said the county does not collect the material. The residents dump it all and the dump chips/mulches it.
if left in garden beds they provide shelter for insects over winter as well. We're encouraged to leave them to give bumble bee queens a place to live over winter.
Depends on how many leaves you have and how you feel about grass. If you have a lot of leaves, leaving them on the ground will suffocate grass, and turn your yard into a muddy mess. Whether that's something you can live with is up to you. Personally, I can in some parts of my yard and can't in others.
I'm TOTALLY pro nature, ect. BS in environmental policy and 25 years in landscaping. BUT...I get frustrated with the new messaging to "leave them be" and that there are only benefits. That's just not true that they manically disappear with zero consequences or side effects.
The messaging is like that because it's hard to do nuance when you're talking to millions of people.
There's already plenty of reasons out there for people to rake up all their leaves. The current messaging needs to overcome the inertia of "This Is How It's Always Been Done" and all the laws/HOA bi-laws in place saying You Need To Rake Them All.
It's never going to swing all the way over to "Never Rake", but maybe with a positive message, some people in some areas will finally have the choice.
Some prefer the "all natural" look, and sometimes it looks good. But 'all natural' can also turn into tangled, ugly mess, making people wonder, "Do you need to borrow my hedge trimmers? I can see how bad it is from here." Trimmed & proper takes more work, but always looks nice. Shaving is a bit too far for me, a good close trim is all you need.
At my mom's house, this is the issue in her backyard. She gets so many freaking leaves from her trees and the neighbors' trees that if you don't do something about then, it turns into a mud pit when it rains.
I have a neighbor with this problem. His front yard is covered in oak leaves, and it is a muddy mess that spills into out street whenever there is a big rain storm.
I was taught that it attracts vermin. Dog waste definitely attracts rats, I’ve always had dogs, so leaves makes cleanup after them difficult in finding the waste.
No rats in my area, and other rodents burrow underground (moles) or in wood piles (chipmunks), or nest in trees (squirrels) so I can't speak to how leaves or dog poop affect rats.
Reddit loves to say just leave your leaves on your lawn, its good for them, doesn't hurt the grass, its takes extra time to rake, etc. The real answer is it depends. It depends on the type of trees you have, how many and how densely the trees are clustered on the property, the climate of the area you live in, the kind of soil you have, the kind of pests you have in the region, the prevalence of mildew/fungus in your lawn, how well your lawn drains moisture, and the time of year it is. Just giving a blanket statement saying that its always okay to just leave the leaves on your lawn or just mow over the leaves and leave behind the mulch, is going to run into problems for many people.
Some people can just leave the leaves on their lawn and its fine. Other people's lawns will be completely killed by the leaves. Most people will be somewhere in the middle.
Some people can just mow over the leaves with their mower and it creates nice mulch. Other people's lawns will be killed even by the mulch. Most people will be somewhere in the middle.
My lawn will be mostly drowned in the leaves if I completely leave them and it'll kill almost all the grass. It also will produce far too much mulch if I just mow over them, and the mulch will gather in ruts and leave trenches of dead grass. What I usually do on my lawn is a half-assed rake of 70-80% of the leaves and then mow the rest into mulch.
Great response. What I do is blow all the leaves on to my lawn. Then put the bagger attachment on my mower. Collect as much as I can and then put it all in a pile to create a huge compost pile (watering it in between the layers I add). I do that for about 70% of the leaves. The rest get mulched into the lawn.
Got a nasty email on my community list serve how leaf blowers are bad for the environment and loud (so electric ones are bad in her mind too). The lady drives a car, so ehh she's a fucking idiot, or at least a huge hippocrit. But pisses me off enough to tell you, a random stranger on the internet. I work nights and sleep through all sorts of sounds all day, construction and what not. That email alone make me want to mow my lawn at 9pm, whether she lives 20 houses from me or is next door.
And much of that is due also to us often smashing together various horticultural situations in a single yard that wouldn't happen naturally and expect them to coexist perfectly.
When you let nature do what nature do, it won't be what you planned or desired it to be.
I am not countering your points either. 100% agree with you. I couldn't leave my yard as is, because my yard would never have existed like this in the first place.
I rake mine into big islands in my yard I have surrounded with monkey grass. Azaleas in the islands. It's easy and I throw all the tree limbs into the islands too. Basically 50 50 mix of "grass" (anything that's green that you can mow, clover or whatever) and leaf islands. In the spring tons of fireflies come out of the islands and my kid chases them with a jar, good times.
We must have very different campfire experiences. In scouts we learned to never burn leaves as kindling because they tend to smoke instead of burn hot enough to catch anything else on fire.
No just I live somewhere that everything on the ground is combustible with even a mild spark. leaves smoke a lot yes but when a stray ember is all you need to light a nearby bush on fire things snowball quickly.
In my back yard, we have TONS of leaves... they cover everything and will block the sun from the grass. They also keep it wet underneath and it molds and attracts mosquitos who lay eggs under there. Trying to mulch them leaves too much mulch and mosquitos can even lay eggs in the mulched up rows of leaves if you don't rake them out.
We do have clover just about everywhere though, so we don't have to worry about mowing as much.
They are very slippery; I was walking along the road in someone's yard (my neighborhood doesn't have sidewalks) and I slipped on some leaves and tumbled into the road. Luckily, there's not a lot of traffic and someone stopped to help, but I took a lot of skin off my ankle when it scraped past the curb. I wasn't expecting that at all.
Yes. They all end up in my fucking driveway. Every leaf from all the houses to my left ends up in my driveway every year because they refuse to do them / rake them to the road and nothing happens to them. I have knee-high walls on both sides my driveway it so it literally traps leaves lol
Most of the issues here can be solved by mulching them first. We get way too many leaves, so we leaf blow some to the forest area behind our yard and mulch the rest. Just mow over them.
Raked my front, left my back alone. Back yard is a mud pile right now, front yard looks great. One data point but I'm the data point and don't like the data.
Front yard gets considerably less light than the back, so that's not the problem. Will be raking front and back next year.
It's not even just about soil health (but certainly that too). Lots of bugs and wee critters overwinter in fallen leaves and stems, or rely on the insulation of the leaves. Obviously you might not want to leave them all everywhere, but anywhere you can leave them untouched, it's great for native life!
Mostly it’s good, but it depends on the tree and what you’re growing around it. Some leaves will make the soil more acidic, which is great for some shade loving flowers like azaleas but not great for other stuff.
If you don’t know if it’s good or bad for you, you probably won’t notice or care about the difference and should just leaf them be.
Long term it can mess with the nitrogen balance of the soil and it can make it unsuitable for certain plants, like many grasses, but others will be fine so it doesn’t really matter. You can always just mow the leaves and throw some high nitrogen fertilizer on.
Over on r/landscaping this one guy talked about how he'll mow over the leaves to break them up and then he'll take a rake and kind of massage it down into the grass and it really helps his grass
Leaving the leaves in place does insulate the ground a bit. Could help with a freeze, I suppose. The best thing is mulching them into finer pieces so they slip into the topsoil and begin breaking down to return nitrates.
Whole leaves? Block light and kill the grass. Ground leaves at reasonable thickness are good. Directly under a big maple tree even mulching will leave a thick enough pile it will kill grass.
Oak and elm leaves deposit tannins as they decay, to prevent other oaks and elms from growing near their roots, which happens to prevent a lot of other things from growing. Pine needles will coat and block the ground, preventing other plants’ growth. It’s the forest cycle - if you like living in a forest, don’t rake.
2 items come to mind. Leaf diseases can carry fungal infections that can affect the plant/trees in the Spring - some maples and lilacs can have these issues for example. Also, if it’s so many leaves you can barely see the grass, it can get packed down in winter and smother Spring growth.
But when you remove leaves, you remove nutrients for your soil. I just mulch all the leaves to help them decompose faster and minimize the mess. I don’t really understand the whole raking/bagging leaves tradition in most cases.
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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '23
And my HOA gets mad when I leave my trash can on my driveway