Leave the leaves

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

If the recent snowfall blanketed your yard before you had a chance to rake up the leaves, don’t worry. You are not an inconsiderate neighbor, a bad American or moral failure. Rather, you did what most experts insist we should all do; but, for various psycho-social and anti-science reasons, we don’t: leave the leaves.

No less than the U.S. Department of Agriculture advises property owners to let the leaves fall where they may — within reason — and do what they are meant to do.

“Leaves create a natural mulch that helps to suppress weeds while fertilizing the soil as it breaks down,” the department wrote in a 2022 advisory article at usda.gov. “The leaves also serve as a habitat for wildlife including lizards, birds, turtles, frogs and insects that overwinter in the fallen leaves. These living creatures help keep pests down and increase pollination in your garden, so having a habitat for them in the fallen leaves can help to keep them around when you need them the most.”

Like most people, I associate autumn with certain tasks — raking leaves, among them. I don’t necessarily mind this chore; but, this year, it struck me that such a traditional process was actually doing more harm than good. I don’t know where this thought came from. Maybe it was a defense mechanism against the chaos of the world and my vague feeling that if we could and should save something, it should be bugs. 

I do prefer them to almost all people. 

Especially now. 

Leaves blanket the yard of a home (not the author’s home). Courtesy photo.

Anyway, based on a week or so of research, my feeling was justified.

John Hastings, of All Seasons Garden and Floral — and also chair of the Sandpoint Planning and Zoning Commission — told me in an email that, “if a thick layer of leaves are left on your lawn, they will choke out grass, just like they choke out weeds when we use them as mulch. If there are only some leaves on your lawn, they will biodegrade and contribute to the fertility of your soil.” 

On his own patch, he said he rakes “a very small portion of the most visible front yard to maintain healthy grass. On 90% of my lawn, I leave the scattered leaves to maintain healthy invertebrate populations.”

Meanwhile, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to describe George Gehrig as one of the area’s most knowledgeable experts on biodiversity and practical methods of maintaining healthy ecosystems. 

Just look at his list of associations: he’s a board member of the Idaho Environmental Education Association and the Society for Conservation GIS (with about 1,000 members in 80 countries); founder both of the Northern Rocky Mountain Biodiversity Challenge and the Wild Ones Northern Rockies Chapter; master melittologist (the study of bees) with the Native Bee Society of B.C. (Canada); and local ambassador of the Xerces Society, which is a national organization dedicated to the conservation of invertebrates.

When I asked Gehrig what he thought about “leaving the leaves,” he sent me tens of thousands of words of research and commentary from various sources. Next year, I’ll write a few thousand words of my own based on what he shared with me. Suffice it to say, Gehrig agrees that leaving the leaves is optimal for overall ecosystem health.

He recognized, of course, that this requires “alternate lawn care decisions, which go against the ingrained dogma of having lawns, which are chemically treated non-native monocultures, that wind up being food deserts. They are a massive waste of time and money, and actually harm the surrounding ecosystems.”

Gehrig agreed with all the other sources I’d found that leaves biodegrading on the soil are good for all the reasons mentioned above — providing nutrition and protection for various insect, animal and plant species — but noted that deep layers of leaves will indeed hurt the grass beneath. 

“[B]ut, again, I’m predisposed against lawns,” he wrote. “I’m a big advocate of replacing lawns with meadows, featuring the most pollinator-friendly plants of our ecoregion that have co-evolved with the duff that seasonally covers the ground (it’s unfortunate that we’ve become brainwashed into thinking that these are ‘weeds,’ and are ‘ugly’).”

Yes — my plan is to replace all of my grass with pollinator-friendly and native flora. But, I’ll admit, Gehrig’s points about the “dogma” of leaf removal and being “brainwashed” into viewing native plants and the product of seasonal leaf-fall as weeds and waste were a big part of my conundrum — bordering on anxiety — about not giving too much of a care about raking my lawn. 

No joke: When I made this pronouncement that we’d “leave the leaves,” it triggered so many discussions and even fights in my household that I was left flabbergasted. I was shocked at the horror, hostility and frankly unreasoning, pearl-clutching nonsense that I heard from people whom I had previously thought of as intelligent and un-prone to propaganda. 

And so, who knew that leaves could be the fourth-rail of American culture? But I guess it makes sense: We are people whose national myth holds that we’re put here by God Himself to take and till every inch of the planet to serve our innermost needs — chief among them, that the neighbors think well of us.

I like my neighbors a lot, but I also like bees and beetles and butterflies and birds (which eat them… the bugs, not the neighbors). 

Ultimately, I call B.S. on all that HOA-suburban mental tyranny and the illogical gymnastics required to sustain it. The people who know best agree. 

“Perhaps an alternate campaign would be to ‘leave the leaves under native (host) trees,’ then to carefully move the remainder to other places on the property,” Gehrig told me. “Caterpillars need the ‘soft landing’ sites leaf litter provides, to complete their development, and overwintering adults need it for shelter. Without native trees, and with the habitat for further developmental stages, there aren’t any/many caterpillars. And without caterpillars, there isn’t food to feed baby birds.”

If you need some other numbers to justify a more laid-back approach to leaves on your lawn, check out the National Wildlife Foundation, which cites the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that, “leaves and other yard debris account for more than 13% of the nation’s solid waste — a whopping 33 million tons a year. 

“Without enough oxygen to decompose, this organic matter releases the greenhouse gas methane. … In fact, solid-waste landfills are the largest U.S. source of man-made methane — and that’s aside from the carbon dioxide generated by gas-powered blowers and trucks used in leaf disposal.”

Combine that with the practice of packing leaves into plastic bags, then burying them in the ground, and you have insanity piled on insanity.

This isn’t some radical, new-age, iconoclast idea. Leaves rotting on the ground is literally how nature works. And I’ll be leaving (most of) my leaves from now on — and feeling no shame.