5 Ways to Use Autumn Leaves in the Garden (Practical Applications)
There’s something that doesn’t feel right about leaves naturally falling from trees only to be stuffed into plastic garbage bags and dumped by the millions into landfills. Biodegradable paper leaf bags offer a partial solution. But wouldn’t it be better to simply use those leaves to enhance your garden instead of treating them as trash? Leaves contain a lot of carbon that when broken down makes great mulch, compost, and even lawn fertilizer.
The key to the successful use of leaves in your landscape is to shred them first, which you can do with a mulching lawnmower or a leaf mulcher. If you don’t shred them, they won’t completely break down over the winter, and you’ll have to rake them up in the spring. It’s also not healthy for lawns to be covered with a mat of whole leaves.
Here are five ways to use shredded leaves around your landscape.
Create Compost
Leaves are a great source of brown, high-carbon material for the compost pile. Simply alternate layers of shredded leaves with the regular green materials you add to your compost pile, such as vegetable and fruit scraps, weeds, grass clippings, and plants that you pull out in your fall garden cleanup. Let all of that sit over the winter. Aerate or turn the pile as needed, and by planting time in the spring, you’ll have finished compost.
Make Leaf Mold
Leaf mold is a wonderful soil amendment that is made from nothing more than fall leaves with a layer of garden soil or finished compost. Layer the shredded leaves and compost and let the pile sit for about a year. And when it’s finished, you have the perfect amendment for vegetable and flower gardens as well as a fantastic addition to potting soil.
Use as Free Mulch
After you shred the leaves, they can be used as an organic mulch in flower beds and vegetable gardens, around trees and shrubs, and in containers. Simply apply a 2- to 3-inch layer of shredded leaves to the beds, keeping the mulch from directly touching the stems and trunks of the plants. The mulch retains moisture in the soil, helps to maintain a consistent soil temperature, and limits weed seed germination. As a bonus, the leaves add nutrients to the soil as they break down.
Hoard for Springtime
Once all the leaf cleanup is finished in the fall, you might not want to see another leaf again. But when spring rolls around and you’re in the garden pruning and weeding again, you’ll have an excess of greens for the compost pile but not enough dry material, such as fall leaves. However, if you’ve thought ahead and hoarded a garbage bag or two of shredded dry leaves over the winter, you won’t have any problem making perfect compost in the spring. The dry leaves will help to prevent your compost from becoming a soggy mess.
Supplement Lawns
There is no reason to rake all the leaves off your lawn if you have a mulching lawn mower. If you run over them with a mower to shred them into small pieces, they’ll break down over the winter, providing your soil with nutrients and suppressing weeds. If you do this once a week until the leaves have finished falling, you likely won’t have to rake a single leaf, and your lawn will look better for it next spring and summer. However, keep in mind this requires a mulching lawnmower, which cuts grass clippings into small enough pieces that can be left on the lawn rather than being collected and bagged. The same theory works with leaves. Most modern lawnmowers have the mulching capability, and older mowers can be converted to mulchers by installing a mulching blade.
https://www.thespruce.com/using-autumn-leaves-in-the-garden-2539787
We’ve started our raking leaves routine that will now continue through till December when we finally give up until Spring returns. We rake not just the leaves from our trees, but also all that blow from our neighbors’ trees that they don’t rake, which blow our way. The first week or two or three, I can deal with it, but by the fourth week, it’s very old, and by Thanksgiving, it irks me that they don’t take care of their own leaves. Being a gracious neighbor becomes a little harder those weeks.
Well, I’ll relate a small success.
My wife’s egg plants just did not do well. Then about the tenth of September, that changed and the plant began to produce blooms and fruit.
Well, fall was coming and cool and cold. I brought the big pot in the house by the glass door. I read up on pollination and learned it was actually very easy. I used a small paint brush to transfer pollen from the male to the female flowers.
It worked. In doors, the plant is producing four new egg plants. The flowers have ceased at least temporarily. We’ll see how it progresses
It has been an interesting experiment
The plants suffered from neglect through a spell of lack of water, being root bound, and in the wrong kinds of pots -- and then from getting drenched and jostled by Hurricane Ian when they were suddenly given to me for safekeeping on the eve of the storm. I would like to rehabilitate the bedraggled survivors for return to my mother in good, even glowing condition if possible.
My plan if to repot them, put them in one or more aquariums under grow lights and warm, humid conditions. I am not a plant person. Am I on the right track?
Make sure and feed your asparagus beds really good! Mine got a good dinner of dry molasses, eggshells, and compost.
Falling leaves .... my new “dumpster fire” status project! The maples are losing leaves fast (and turning red!) so I need to dig out the compost pile (like tomorrow!) to make room for this year’s leaves.
No garden time this week - dad had doc appointments Tues/Wed/Thur & the pastor came to visit Friday. He has a doc appointment Monday & then family from FL is stopping in for a visit Tuesday. Whew!! The appointments are all early afternoon - keeps me from going out & getting dirty in the garden in the a.m. & we get home late enough that it pretty much knocks out the afternoon for work as well.
Spent this morning at a church yard sale - got to talk to some folks & enjoyed myself quite a bit. Sold a few things, too .... turns out there was a ‘Fall Run’ in the nearby town that had traffic in a snarl, so visitors to the sale were way down from last year. It was still a gorgeous morning to be outside.
Okie dokie .... found something ‘new’ to me in the “Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots” book. Who has heard of making ‘walking sticks’ out of cabbage (for those who have not read the book!)?? Fascinating!
How to make a walking stick from cabbage
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/how_to_make_a_walking_stick_from_cabbage
Walking Stick Cabbage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk_d9bZp-dU
MAKING A CABBAGE (KALE) WALKING STICK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcdKbTWO8w
Hubby cleaned out the veggie garden this afternoon. Our growing season is finished. He found one mid-sized zucchini, so I will fry that with supper tonight.
This year he learned what tomato wilt is. Our cucumber plants also were infected with something, so yield in both those items was down. Bush beans were great and for the first time he planted in two week intervals, so we had some to harvest for quite some time. Our peppers produced a lot this year.
I learned that if I plant herbs in the veggie garden, I use them less often than if I plant them in pots on the patio. :)
What did this growing season teach each of you?
Believe it or not, I’ve got a few buckshot-sized green tomatoes, even though the foliage is almost all dead and crunchy.
Any gardener FReepers know of any sure-fire ways to either repel or kill gophers? Normally I’m the most peace-loving old goat there is, but I’ve just HAD IT with seeing everything I’ve worked for destroyed. I put poison peanuts in the holes, and stick mashed garlic cloves in the ground as a barrier, but although those remedies seem to work at first, they never last.
If any of you have already given me advice on the gopher problem, please overlook the repetition. Nearly lost my best friend a few weeks back, and although the friend is recovering, I’m still pretty distracted and temporarily not retaining info as well as usual.
Hi Diana and any other FReepers reading this thread. Have you noticed a shortage lately of available heirloom seeds? We’re having trouble locating some good artichoke seeds. Any suggestions for online suppliers that aren’t Amazon-based? Thanks in advance.
Pumpkin Gratin
JACQUES PEPIN The only way I ate pumpkin as a child was in a savory gratin, so the first time I had it in the United States — sweet, in a pie — I thought it was a mistake. I’ve come to love pumpkin pie and I still enjoy pumpkin in the gratin of my youth. The combination of Swiss cheese, eggs, and cream comes together into something like a smooth and creamy soufflé, capturing the flavors of fall. Canned pumpkin speeds things up.
4 servings
1 can (15.5 ounces) 100% pure pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
3 large eggs
1 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup grated Swiss cheese
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon unsalted butter
1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spoon the pumpkin puree into a food processor and add the eggs, cream, cheese, salt, and pepper. Process for 10 to 15 seconds to combine.
Coat a 6-cup gratin dish with the butter. Fill the dish with the pumpkin mixture. Sprinkle the Parmesan cheese on top and bake for 35 to 45 minutes, until set and lightly browned on top. Serve.
I've been chipping away at the project list trying to get the place ready for winter. I've finished about half of the fall tree pruning and I'm hoping to have the rest done by the end of the week. Made a big dent in cleaning up the clutter in the bomb room at Pops' house to make space for winter produce storage. Made a few repairs yesterday to the fence around the riding arena. Ordered a twin-screw load of manufactured sand, which I'm hoping will arrive today, to refresh the footing along the rail.
I'm mostly finished putting up peppers from the garden. I ran ~15lbs through the smoker over the weekend. I still need to grind them, but they're plenty dehydrated so there's no rush on that. Mrs. Augie stuffed a dozen of the Big Chilis with a cheesy taco meat mix and wrapped them in bacon yesterday evening. I tossed them on the smoker long enough to cook the bacon nice and crispy and ho-lee cow were they good. There were way more than we could use so I took the excess (two large paper grocery bags full to the brim) to the office last week and put them on the break room table.
Got my garlic in the ground on Saturday (150-ish cloves) and gave it a nice blanket of composted horse poo. It's been a few years since the garden received a fresh layer of compost so I went back over it yesterday and filled in the space between the rows. The tomatoes are still hanging on, but if the weather guessers are right they will all be dead by morning. Nighttime low temps in the mid 20s are predicted for the next two nights. I'll use the old run the sprinkler all night trick to try to save the sweet corn.
Since I was already working on board fence and had all my tools out it seemed like a good time to work on planter boxes in the greenhouse. I ran out of daylight before I finished, but it won't take much to complete. I'm hoping to grow some salad greens in there during the winter.
