Johannesburg - Every autumn and winter, much to the dismay of many enlightened natural gardeners, hundreds of homeowners toss bags full of fallen leaves into their wheelie bins.
Sure, many trees lost their leaves in autumn, but most gardens around town have plenty continuing to fall. It’s time that people started appreciating the value of organic matter, especially this “brown gold”. Why make so much work for yourself when there are more time- and cost-effective ways of using them?
Leaves are jam-packed with trace minerals that will benefit your soil, providing food for earthworms and beneficial microbes. They carry between 50 and 80 percent of the nutrients that a tree extracts from the soil and air, including potassium, phosphorus and carbon. They’ll help to lighten heavy clay soils, and if you have particularly sandy soil, it will help retain moisture. So why waste them?
The clever thing to do is to put them in your flower or veggie beds, or in containers, to act as an attractive natural mulch, keeping your tender plants roots nice and warm during the winter, cooling the soil in the heat of day in summer, suppressing weed growth and diseases in potting soil mixes, and lessening evaporation from the earth – which means less watering, a good thing at any time of the year.
Don’t stress about having to shred them. All you need do is leave them where they are on the lawn, and drive over them a few times when you’re mowing.
Shredding the leaf into smaller pieces does good things: it increases the surface area, giving microbes more places to work on; prevents leaves packing together into layers that won’t allow water or air to penetrate; and makes the overall volume much smaller, meaning you’ll have 10 bags of leaves condensed into one.
You can rake these up, pop them into a plastic bag and let them become leaf mould. If you have space, try building a simple leaf bin – a simple cage-like structure that shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes to put together.
All you need do, then, is place a 5-10cm layer of these leaves on your beds, keeping them from directly touching the stems and trunks of plants.
You can also leave them where they are, to break down over the rest of the winter. They will provide the soil with nutrients, stop weeds from popping up, and you’ll end up with a lawn that looks all the better for it come springtime.
Leaves are perfect to add to your compost heap as they are a fabulous source of carbon, which will balance out the nitrogen.
If you keep them till spring rolls around, you’ll have some ready-to-hand brown material to layer with all the “greens” you’ll amass when you start weeding, pruning and deadheading. This will stop your compost from becoming soggy, and save you having to add torn-up newspaper to the pile.
Get the kids in on the action! Who can resist raking up piles of leaves and running and jumping into them? Great, dirty fun – and it will help break down the leaves into smaller pieces. Grab a rake!
Saturday Star
* Melanie and landscape designer Michael Rickhoff host Grounded, a radio show dedicated to all things green, on 1485am Radio Today on Saturdays at 11.30am (available on DStv audio channel 869).