You’ve traded the lawn mower for the rake. You’ve gone outside in the crisp, cool weather and gathered those fallen leaves off your lawn. But now those big piles of leaves are looming large, and the fun of jumping in them is subsiding. What the heck are you gonna do with all those leaves?
Use them in your garden! Leaves can provide at least two useful materials for your yard: leaf mulch and leaf mold. Let’s start with the mulch.  Add Photo to Journal |  | | Photo Credit: Frank Tansey | | Shredded oak leaves make a great mulch for a tri-colored beech tree in an atrium planter. |
My former landlords enthusiastically encouraged my roommate and me to hand over the leaves we’d rake up to make mulch. The landlords put the leaves through a giant shredder and then simply gave it all back to us to spread on top of the soil in our garden. If you don’t have a shredder, you can run a lawn mower over a pile of leaves a few times. (Seriously.) A mower with a clipping bag is ideal for this. Another way to shred the leaves is to put them in a garbage can and use a string trimmer to “blend” the leaves into pieces. (Wear safety goggles for shredding!) Truth is, you don’t actually have to shred the leaves – it’s just that we found that the chopped leaves stayed put better than whole leaves, despite the winter wind.
A great time to mulch is after the first few frosts. Clear the area of dead vegetation in your garden then apply about 2 inches of your leaf mulch. The benefits of using leaf mulch are many, including keeping down weeds, protecting the soil from temperature extremes, preventing soil erosion and adding nutrients to the soil as the leaves decompose. After doing this just once, I didn’t question why my landlords were so enthusiastic about leaf mulch.
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