Autumn leaves on your lawn have to be dealt with, or they will ruin it. Likewise, your lovely stone, brick, and concrete areas will get slippery and require more frequent cleaning if leaves cover them for long.
If you have a small garden with some trees around it, it’s likely that you won’t reasonably be able to compost all the leaves yourself.
We say that the best option for your garden and the environment in that situation is to burn the leaves in a bonfire or garden incinerator, and scatter the ashes over your beds. Some people may disagree with that, but they aren’t at any of our legendary bonfire parties.
If burning is not practical, your last resort are the heroic council workers who will spirit your green waste away and compost it for you.
But if you have a larger garden, there is a canny method to turn all those leaves into instant mulch for your beds, keeping all the goodness in your garden with minimum impact on the environment: mow over them.
Wait until their lawn has its first light covering of leaves, then mow it (on a higher setting than in Summer, which should be done through the cold season) to shred the leaves. Many modern mowers have a mulch setting for this purpose.
With a clever mowing pattern, you don’t even need a bag on the mower (assuming it shoots the debris out the back and to one side: almost all mowers do this).
You can blow all the bits out onto beds and under hedges as mulch. It looks messy at first and makes the job much quicker, which is why professional gardeners who charge hourly don’t normally do it for their clients. But as soon as it rains, all those little bits get washed down and flattened neatly against the soil.
Depending on the species of tree around your garden, you will usually need to mulch-mow like this two to four times each Autumn.
Now, you could simply rake the intact leaves onto your flower and vegetable beds without mulching them: it’s still great for the soil.
However, intact leaves have some drawbacks compared to shredded ones:
- Intact leaves provide more shelter for slugs & snails
- Intact leaves easily get blown around in the wind, while shredded ones tend to matt together and stay where you put them
- Intact leaves of some trees are pretty slow to decay and can build up year-on-year in the right conditions. Shredded leaves all decay quickly, especially when mixed with some grass clippings.
The other option, where you have room for it, is a second compost pile for leaves. Autumn leaves count as brown/carbon in your compost, and there are so many in Autumn that you may not have enough green/nitrogen matter to mix with the leaves for effective composting.
A big leaf-only compost pile becomes a source of leaf mould.