Leaf mulch

Those of us in deciduous forest habitats (and with lots of deciduous trees in our gardens and neighborhoods) have plenty of free organic mulch.

First, save your own leaves -- don't let any of those go to the curb.

Second, snag your neighbor's leaves.  We collect bags full of them.

one of our leaf stashes!

Finally, corral the leaf-vacuum trunk (if available) and have them dump a load or two in your driveway!

Why buy hardwood or pine bark mulch for your garden when leaves are free?

Using leaf mulch

It always amazes us that some of our neighbors don't keep their leaves. 

My gardening companion and gardening assistant with leaf bounty

They're such a great source of organic matter, and usually nutrient-rich, too, it's like throwing away the bags of organic material available for purchase at big-box stores. 

We're not talking big bucks here, but dry leaves are a LOT easier to move around than bags of mushroom compost, pine bark nuggets, or hardwood mulch.

Putting leaves out

We've got a long back slope in the mountains that benefits from leaves, and we have plenty of space to put as many as we can collect. 

My gardening companion (aka my husband Tim) is restoring it as a hardwood forest, pulling up the English ivy, editing the box elders and wild cherries, removing the debris of some decades, and opening it up for a variety of suitable tree and shrub species, not to mention understory woodland plants.

For understory plants to thrive, though, we need more mulch to enrich the soil, creating the deeper layers that support them in natural conditions.  It'll be fun to start planting when the soil's ready.

Do my shrubs need fertilizer?

A participant in a perennial class today mentioned fertilizers. She'd found that the local Wal-Mart isn't selling 10-10-10 (NPK) anymore, only 10-0-10 (eliminating the phosphorus that can be problematic in streams, ponds, and lakes). She likes to apply 10-10-10 around her garden every spring, she said. Another participant said that she'd found 10-10-10 at Lowes.

And I'm thinking, goodness, why would you want to spread fertilizer around shrubs and trees in your garden every year?

Annuals and edibles certainly need fertilizer (I use organic time-release and compost), but most shrubs, and trees should be quite fine with regular organic mulches, since we don't harvest them. Some herbaceous perennials will benefit from a bit of (preferably organic) fertilizer in addition to mulch, since we often do cut their flowers or remove their spent foliage.

Soil tests provide the most accurate information, of course, about your soil nutrient levels and degraded urban and suburban soils may need building up, to be sure.

But the most important thing to do is to keep the organic matter produced by your garden plants (leaves, twigs, etc) IN your garden, recycling it as either as mulch, compost, or both. That's what happens in natural ecosystems, after all.

An abundance of leaves

In the early morning light, the bags of leaves looked like an odd sculptural arrangement. We've been snagging bags to cover the hardwood mulch with a thick leaf blanket, and these were from a neighbor's evening efforts.

The city is full of fallen leaves: oak, maple, beech, and others.

A beautiful fall weekend provided a great opportunity for folks to start moving leaves to the curb or bagging them up to go to the city leaf pile. Thankfully, rakes are the tool of choice in small yards, so the afternoon had been free of the noise of the leaf blowers that mar fall weekends in rural and suburban areas.

We've picked up at least 25 bags by now, and my gardening companion is out hunting for more -- we've got plenty of space to put them so it's like getting bags of organic treasure.