I'm tired of removing leaves... About 1/2 of our garden is beds with small trees, bushes, bulbs, wild flowers and perennials. Now here's my question..
Should I remove the leaves from these beds, which I wouldn't like, or should I just leave them there and let the rest to mother Nature?
Of course I've removed all leaves from lawn...
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rainbowgardener
- Super Green Thumb
- Posts: 25279
- Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 6:04 pm
- Location: TN/GA 7b
Removed leaves from the lawn as in raked? You know you really don't need to do that. If you just run your lawn mower over them, it chops them up in to small pieces that then break down and help add organic matter/ fertility to your soil. You don't want to leave whole leaves on the lawn because they tend to mat together and smother the lawn and they don't break down very well whole.
Re the flower beds, that's a debatable question (most garden questions are!).
Here's a thread where that was discussed:
https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19843&highlight=sanitation
My personal preference (with a relatively small yard
) is to clean everything up at the end of the season. If you read about pests, it frequently says things like "overwinters in garden debris." So I remove everything and then put mulch down, which maybe is a big waste of time, but I'm HOPING the larvae or eggs or pupae or whatever were in all the stuff I cleared out and now there won't be any in the new clean mulch I just put down. But maybe that's all wishful thinking.
Re the flower beds, that's a debatable question (most garden questions are!).
Here's a thread where that was discussed:
https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19843&highlight=sanitation
My personal preference (with a relatively small yard
) is to clean everything up at the end of the season. If you read about pests, it frequently says things like "overwinters in garden debris." So I remove everything and then put mulch down, which maybe is a big waste of time, but I'm HOPING the larvae or eggs or pupae or whatever were in all the stuff I cleared out and now there won't be any in the new clean mulch I just put down. But maybe that's all wishful thinking.My dad's mulch he buys from home depot always fills up with roaches(they don't come with the mulch, but show up later). Doesn't matter what time of year it is, you kick around some mulch and you'll find roaches hard at work. That's why under our bushes, I just leave the leaves and debri there. Let them winter in your mulch/leaves, and they won't winter in your house.rainbowgardener wrote:I'm HOPING the larvae or eggs or pupae or whatever were in all the stuff I cleared out and now there won't be any in the new clean mulch I just put down. But maybe that's all wishful thinking.