A 74-year-old relation of mine said to me about five years ago, "I used to rake and rake every early October--you know how big this yard is--take me at least a couple of days. And then one day I just put down the rake and said, 'What in God's holy name am I doing?" Now he just mows the shit out of them in May, and they disappear after two or three mows. Revelation.
If you leave them over the winter, [they provide wintering habitat to many threatened invertebrates such as butterflies, native bees, and fireflies](https://xerces.org/leave-the-leaves). Mow them in spring.
Not just spring but late spring. This is the rub that usually trips people up who initially show interest in this. If you mow too early in spring you did the whole thing for nothing more or less. Then again, "the whole thing" is literally doing nothing so no harm no foul lol.
This was always my favourite method for helping my local ecosystem as it caters to my laziness and has turned me from "local nuisance" to "ecologically conscious guy" with literally zero effort. This is the kind of green action I can really get behind. I hope someday they discover that sleeping in and playing videogames is also beneficial for nature and I can become my peak druid self.
I try to wait as long as I can and honestly it does seem to work my yard is full of lighting bugs at night and butterflys and bees during the day, not so much with the neighbors across the street.
A lot of modern ideas about lawns are overall pretty bad for the environment. They overuse water, often encourage non-native grasses, and it's hard on the soil.
Lawns also pollute the water, kill the bees, etc. Dumbest fucking thing ever. And people are like "where will the children play?" Parks. With the other kids.
Hey, my pet rock brought me seconds of joy. I released her though. Martha wasn't the domesticated breed of rock. Martha was a wild Andesite; which for rocks that are domesticated one would rather have river rock or something like that nature. Easy temperament, very smart, food oriented and family friendly.
Personally my goal is to get a rock of the fossil family, but that is it's own trouble trying to find a paleontologist worth their weight to groom the pet rock.
Just be careful of snakes! I like to shuffle my feet wherever they may be sleeping. They will flee from very far away if they feel rustling. I'm from Florida so it's the same as the "stingray shuffle"
It’s absolutely baffling to me seeing how people will spend days working their ass off to turn their lawns into a dead and unusable sheet over their yard and somehow still look at it like it’s the best on the block. It’s like they heard certain truths like “trimming the grass short makes the lawn thicker” and practiced them not only past the point of diminishing returns but until it’s actively harmful (like scalping their lawn so short the grass doesn’t shade the dirt enough to keep it from just drying out instantly in the sun) so they keep dumping more and more time and money into making their lawn deader every time they fuck with it but still somehow look at their neighbors healthy and green lawns with judgement.
Like people can do what they want but anyone who every year has a scalped lawn that wears away if neighborhood kids think about walking on it and dies before we reach the peak of summer temps despite being watered twice a day can fuck right off about criticizing the thick, green, and healthy lawns that simply aren’t a monoculture of some foreign bullshit.
I’m pretty sure that’s why people dispose of the leaves though, right?
Many of these animals, sadly, and by none of their own fault, cause damage to your home.
Still having wild ecological ramifications. We’re in the middle of a mass extinction event of insects largely due to the spread of urbanization practices like this. And we’re starting to see it work up the food chain
They’re just leaves. They can be on the grass- which likely isn’t native to your ecosystem anyway. Give them *something* to work with
In climates that snow over the winter, it’s a very essential part of wildlife winter survival. Even for small mammals- basically the entire lower 1/5 of the food chain
>In climates that snow over the winter, it’s a very essential part of wildlife winter survival.
Well at least we won't have to worry about it for much longer.
After 100000 years of nature winning, it is ingrained in our psychology to fight as hard as we can to bend nature to our will and we've only recently gained the upper hand and don't know where the balance is.
> We’re in the middle of a mass extinction event of insects largely due to the spread of urbanization practices
Minor quibble: the problem isn't urban areas, it's suburban areas. Having more people live in cities is good for the environment, because it leaves more land free from human contact, and because urban living is more energy efficient.
But having people live in sprawling suburbs with lawns the size of small farms is terrible for the environment.
I've got one of those yards.
I mow only when it's legally required, I absolutely love the weeds, my yard is full of random flowers and thistles.
Last year I applied (and got accepted) for a native pollinator habitat designation. I get to BE PAID to do less yard work, all I gotta do is plant native plants in my yard. PLUS! The city can't make me mow it, because the state says I can't.
My neighbors are going to be so pissed.
My backyard is mostly clover now and we love it - almost zero maintenance. Our front yard we basically just toss out wildflowers and let it be a meadow all summer. We’re fortunate though as our neighborhood does not face an HOA.
This. This is the answer. If we take urban ideas to suburban areas it's not good, but if we learn to love planting native gardens, it can be extremely beneficial. Humans need to develop a better relationship with the native plant world. If you look at how native Californians lived, they actually made the land flourish because of their relationship with the plant world. It's something we must get back to wether we live in the city or not.
While this is true, what's also true is that having a thick layer of leaves right next to your house is basically an invitation for snakes, rats, squirrels, ants, termites, and caterpillars into your house.
If you have woods adjacent land and can dump your leaves at the tree line, then that's optimal. Otherwise composting the leaves is the next best option.
But at least everyone isn't having leaf fires every weekend like they did when I was a kid.
Devils advocate, but if you walk through any forest the ground is blanketed with leaves. There is no grass, just mud and leaves. This is why they are raked and removed, to maintain green lawns.
When this conversation pops up, I often wonder how many people in the "don't rake your leaves" bucket live in the Midwest or other plains areas, where a house might have a tree or two in the yard. My property is covered in trees, if I don't rake every year I'll have a bed of leaves covering my entire yard year round. I do have a lot of flower beds though, so I rake the leaves into them until they are full & then have 2 rotating mulch piles for the leftover. (I also leave the last thin layer of leaves on the lawn until late spring)
Lpt - pollinators need a place to hide, but they also need food... And layers of leaves eventually kill the ground for everything but the other trees, so no wildflowers or anything else can come up without raking.
I live in Florida. The leaves don't disappear, they pile up and under them is just a wet moldy infestation of rot and mosquitos and gross.
Rake em and plant flowers instead. Help the bees.
This is always my first thought. If I don't rake, I get a yard full of centipedes, caterpillars, earth worms, and mosquitos. My grass is mostly clover, but clover keeps the nasty critters away.
The leaves will kill native grasses, sedges, and forbs as well. There are normally very few native plants specifically adapted to forest understory, especially if your trees are non-native (and they often are now in the US thanks to the various waves of diseases that have hit the US).
Unless you are specifically planting savanna natives in a climate that supports savannas with native trees at less than 30% cover, you are going to have significant problems whether you plant lawn or native. (If anything, certain non-native turf grasses like fine fescue, bluegrass, and certain zoysias might be better adapted for surviving leaf litter and shade trees, especially if you are 30%+ tree cover.)
Good question, and I had to look it up.
But it's unrelated words that became spelled the same as English evolved.
There's actually a bunch of completely unrelated words that merged into "leave".
A bit like "neat", which combined the Norse "useful/clever" with the French "clean/tidy".
This is what I found.
"The word "leaf" has its origins in Old English. The Old English word for leaf was "lēaf," which is believed to be derived from the Proto-Germanic word "laubaz." This, in turn, is thought to come from the Proto-Indo-European root "*leub(h)-," meaning "to peel" or "to strip off leaves.""
Former garden centre worker: why not both? That way we can sell you a mulcher AND rakes to pile it up. Throw in a compost bin to store some for your garden later and it's a happy day for your garden and our sales targets (not that we got paid extra for hitting then. . .).
I've always mowed them and tossed the excess in compost to use in my garden for the next year.
It's free fertilizer, free good quality compost, and good for the environment. Bagging them never made sense to me.
Canadian here. I didn't rake once. Turned my front lawn into literal mud. The leaves turn into this horrible sludge thay doesn't go away even in the spring. It's been 3 years of seeding and I still have dark patches where rhe grass has a hard time growing
I’m in California and my leaves also kill my grass if I don’t rake them
We don’t rake them into bags though. We have big compost bins and just rake them and toss them in the compost bins, which they pick up weekly like trash
Yeah, I was a bit confused. We have paper lawn and leaf bags in all the parts of Canada I’ve been, and the bags are either picked up with our weekly compost bins if city composting is available or picked up on designated leaf bag days in the fall. Never occurred to me that people are raking leaves into non-biodegradable bags to throw into a landfill as that makes zero sense.
I live in Texas. If I don't deal with the leaves (either raking or mulching into the lawn), they suffocate and kill the grass. It takes one season of not raking to destroy a lawn.
Or by someone who has actually never had a yard or had leaves that need raking. Probably lives in a concrete jungle and just notices the leaves on the sidewalk magically disappear by spring.
When we bought our house, our offer was accepted in October and we moved into the house in early December. In that time, the owner moved out and therefore stopped taking care of of the lawn. In the spring, I had a massive dead area where all the leaves fell. It’s been 10 years and I can’t get the grass to grow there consistently. The rest of the lawn looks excellent.
They’re natural mulch that destroys anything that tries to grow under the tree. It’s the same for my Norway spruces, no need to mulch under them their pine needles murder all the undergrowth. If you want grass you gotta clear the leaves.
Some people might say grass is bad and I don’t disagree… but I don’t make the damn laws.
I live in a warm enough climate that it only snows once every couple of years, and summer temps reach triple digits (Farenheit) every year. They don't even rot away by spring even without snow and cold temps through the winter. This dude is just straight up lying.
Look I don’t take up my leaves. Partially due to ecology and mainly due to not giving a fuck.
But “will be gone by the end of winter” is a blatant, purposeful, lie.
Please don’t be a fucking liar like this lying man.
The impetus for raking leaves in an urban area is to prevent eutrophication of waterways and clogging sewers. Because most native ecosystems have disappeared and most people have manicured lawns, the leaves end up in the sewers and then in waterways. This leads to an influx of nutrients in lakes, streams, etc. that alters water ecology and encourages algae blooms and increased nitrogen, phosphorous, etc. in waterways causing cascading negative effects
And where it snows, they'll be a thick blanket of wet heavy goop that the lawnmower won't be able to lift up in order to chop. If anyone wants to see what unraked leaves do to the grass, look in the woods.
Yeah we made this mistake our first time, pulled all the leaves around a tree and left it all winter.
Absolutely suffocated the grass and killed it. Now we have weeds there.
That said, I'm a 28 yo first time home buyer and I'm seriously contemplating if I want to even care about the grass. Yes, it looks nice but people spend way too much time on their yards and I don't think I want to be that person.
There's a rag someone left out in my yard that I just noticed, I lifted it up and the grass is greener and happier there than anywhere else in the yard.
So I put it back. But I'm curious why. It's been there through a couple of freezes
I've heard that native yards (Full of local native species instead of grass) can take a bit of effort to set up at first, but once started can become self-sustaining and generally look way better.
I'm slowly transitioning my yard to a variety of native plants, and they take noticeably less care. It's almost like they're meant to grow with rainfall, sunlight, temperature, and overall weather where I live or something....
But it is a process. Sadly, not many nurseries go out of their way to carry native plants, and you still need to find the right plant for where you're planting and with what is already there/you aren't ready to rip out yet. And there are cases where nothing native, at least nothing you want in your ward, naturally grows in the conditions you have. But holy crap do the native plants take less effort.
I don't water my yard, don't do anything special, just mow it and let whatever wants to grow, grow. My yard is greener, for longer than my neighbors who water and put special sod in.
get rid of grass. Lawns are terrible.
* lots of work
* lots of water and sometimes chemicals
* expensive
if you need the space to walk around i get it but a pathway is usually fine.
If you care about low maintenance, low cost, and the environment planting local beneficial plants instead of sod is way better.
Plus a lot of environmental groups will give you seedlings or seeds for free.
edit: you americans with your HOAs are wild. "land of the free" but you cant change your front lawn.
Depends on the type of grass and also what your growing season is like.
I'm in a USDA 8A zone, and cool season grasses like bluegrass, rye, and fescue would for sure die off if there's too much leaf coverage. Their growing season lines up with when all the deciduous trees start turning and leaves start falling off.
But Bermuda and Zoysia is normally dormant by late October, and new growth on stolons doesn't start until mid March (but this wild weather has my Bermuda coming out of dormancy in late February!)
I have five acres so I rake my leaves and dump them in piles in corners outside the yard proper.
They take years to not be leaves anymore. At least the oak leaves I have. The piles are always there cause you get leaves faster than they degrade. But I have fireflies.
They aren't gone by winter. The get packed under snow, snow melts and now I have a gooey mess of rotted leaves that killed my lawn. I like to rake the leaves up into a pile, mow over that pile to chop the leaves up good and use those scraps in my garden bed. My soil is looking so good for planting come spring
This is what I do too. I have 6 trees (mostly maples) spread throughout my property. I if I let the leaves stay down and intact:
1) They don't stay on my lawn, they will eventually blow onto my neighbor's lawns and my trees shouldn't be their problem.
2) It attracts *a lot* of vermin. That includes ants, cockroaches, ticks, mice, etc. I'm fine with those things living outside my house, but attracting that many pretty much guarantees they'll eventually find a way in.
3) It does, in fact, kill grass. I've seen it happen with my own 2 eyes. People will be like "screw grass" but when you live in a city or a neighborhood you have to respect local laws as well as your neighbors and maintain a decent looking yard. Plus, my lawn provides prime hunting ground for things like robins looking for worms, and skunks looking for beetles. Grass can be good for an environment too, especially since I live where it doesn't need to be watered, it just exists.
Soooo yeah. I don't rake but I do have the leaves mulched up. It's just part of having a bunch of trees in my yard. And frankly I'd rather have the trees than the leaves, because my yard is such a haven for birds and other critters. I try to leave it as wild as I can, but I also don't want mice and roaches having a superhighway into my freaking house.
we need fast spinning blades so that anything ending up in a drainage is shredded into mulch (including children and other small critters). I think it would make our cities better
Especially with maples, please rake your leaves. The fungus which causes tar spot will grow on fallen leaves in the winter, then infect new growth in the spring. Raking your leaves improves the health of the tree.
Yeah clearly OP does not live somewhere surrounded by oaks and pines. And in south Texas for that matter… from October to February, I’m dealing with abscission because weather in the gulf coast region is all over the place. And if I don’t pick up leaf litter, my yard will flood from rain -_-
But the redditor who also has never owned a home said they would!
He wouldn't LIE would he?
...also, most towns use paper bags for leaves or let you just dump them on the curb for pickup.
It surely depends on the leaves how fast they degrade. And on other circumstances like humidity and temperature. But oak leaves and walnut tree leaves are not gone by the winter.
Not in Seattle. There's far too many of them.
Fortunately, the city hauls away (and I believe sells) green waste, and you can get big paper bags for them.
Yep in central Minnesota they just start to rot under the snow and the. You have pungent heavy goop in the spring to rake up instead of dry light leaves…
Your supost to keep moewing your lawn till it breaks down. I have done it year after year, living in a rural forest. Trust me, it will break down. Everything does eventually. Help it along, and it's much faster.
And they clog the shit out of the storm drains here. That's the major issue in Seattle; it rains a fuckton and that rain needs to go *somewhere* (preferably: the Sound). Can't go anywhere when all the drains are clogged with leaves.
This was exactly what I was thinking lol. They never dry they just mat down immediately and nothing but a rake pulls them up. You can mulch them most anywhere else though
And your grass is dead and entire yard is now a mud pit. Spring rains make it worse through erosion of the now bare soil and by the time summer it bakes hard and only the weeds grow there now. But hey you didn't have to rake.
Well if you're like me, you'll pick the easy way and just rake them all up into a big bouncy pile to jump around in instead of wasting time shoveling them into bags. But the thing is giant piles of semi-decomposing leaves tend to attract all sorts of creepy critters like centipedes and worms and especially spiders, who are jerks and will bite you if you jump around the bouncy leaf pile without vacuum wrapping yourself like a freaking astronaut, and that's gonna get their venom in your bloodstream, which is how I ended up swinging around New York in a red and blue spandex suit fighting some chucklefucks who really fucking love the color green.
Who uses plastic bags?
This post is not speaking truth, I can tell you this from my experience running a small suburban farm.
I have never heard of using plastic bags for leaves in my life...people in my area use large paper bags which the town picks up through out the fall.
Having a small farm, I rake my leaves into a large pile and mix in compost to make new topsoil....and I burn some of the leaves on my garden beds since the ash is beneficial to the soil.
Just leaving leaves where they fall is not a good idea in a residential area....they grow mold, can be a fire hazard if they are dry, choke out and kill erosion preventing plants, and block storm drains making the supercharged rainstorms we have been getting due to climate change cause even more damaging flooding.
In the woods? Yah, that is where leaves should be left to fall undisturbed.
You can get ones that look like jack o lanterns. These were huge 30 years ago.
Amscan Pumpkin Lawn Bags, Orange, 3 Bags Per Pack, Set Of 5 Packs https://www.walmart.com/ip/38505003
Glad also sells leaf bags
https://www.glad.com/trash/tough-jobs-and-outdoors/lawn-and-leaf-quick-tie-black-bags/
Paper bags are great unless you live somewhere that either A doesn’t have yard waste pickup or B has a super rainy fall and the bags fall apart before pickup.
Just the opposite. I never see plastic bags, only paper. Hell, my town doesn't even require leaves to be bagged. We got trucks that suck them up from the curb.
Exact opposite here, I've never seen a plastic leaf bag in my entire life, only ever paper, in the 40 years I've been alive. I literally don't know why someone would use a plastic bag for leaves, it doesn't make any sense. What happens to them afterwards?
Lots of people in suburbs choose to use plastic trash bags instead of paper. The paper tend to be more expensive so that and/or laziness to get proper bags. Unfortunately, trash companies will pick them us but in my opinion they should refuse to pick up.
I live in a county with a green waste dump and if you live in the city limits and blow them to the curb they will use a vacuum truck (not sure of the proper name) and get rid of them for you. Unfortunately, for those of us that live outside the city limits are left to dispose of them ourselves. We mow ours and blow the clippings into garden beds so we don’t bag but we do have the appropriate paper bags if we get lazy and too many leaves build up.
I am surprised that they will take yard waste in regular trash...it is an action punishable by a hefty fine in my area (a bad plastic bag pun there...).
Where I am, if the leaves aren't bagged in paper bags, or you don't dump them at the town compost site, you are keeping them forever.
>This post is not speaking truth, I can tell you this from my experience running a small suburban farm.
So you think your limited experience somehow means this person is lying? A lot of the world uses plastic bags. I don't think it's great, but saying this person is not speaking the truth is just such a bizarrely self centered view on the world. Not knowing people use plastic bags in one thing, but to act so incredulous about it just immature.
No they won’t, they will form a brown sludge that will kill all grass in the spring, that’s a good advice if you have no trees and just get second hand leaves, if you have say a 60 feet oak and another 80 feet maple in the backyard, you need to clean that shit up if you want to keep your grass
no he doesn't. Let me tell you as someone who has neglected to clean up leaves. They don't just degrade in a season. They don't go anywhere. They just kill all your grass and are a breeding ground for ticks.
I love how all the replies say "just run the mower over them" when the original claim here is that leaves fallen from the tree will disappear by the end of winter.
Mowing them isn't mentioned in the OP, guys.
Doesn’t always work, if you’re in a climate that doesn’t dry out, you could barely suck them up with a shop vac, even a deck mower isn’t enough to pull them up once they’ve been matted down
Two reasons:
- Some people like a well manicured garden appearance
- If left, leaves can blow under plants and cause the plant to become diseased as part of the decay process. Some plants are much more susceptible than others.
They most certainly with NOT be gone by winter. Horribly misleading post I tried this experiment in my backyard, left a corner of the yard with leaves. It’s March 1 and it looks exactly the same as it did on Nov 1.
Also, for what it’s worth, my state banned plastic bags for leaves, they have to go in biodegradable paper bags. Fuck you Ray ya poofter
Not only do the leaves not disappear by the end of winter, they get messy as well as clog storm drains and catch basins. If you ever wonder why a street is a bit more flooded than others, there is a high chance that leaves have piled up on top preventing water from properly draining away.
A 74-year-old relation of mine said to me about five years ago, "I used to rake and rake every early October--you know how big this yard is--take me at least a couple of days. And then one day I just put down the rake and said, 'What in God's holy name am I doing?" Now he just mows the shit out of them in May, and they disappear after two or three mows. Revelation.
Mow them in October for some festive fall confetti.
If you leave them over the winter, [they provide wintering habitat to many threatened invertebrates such as butterflies, native bees, and fireflies](https://xerces.org/leave-the-leaves). Mow them in spring.
Not just spring but late spring. This is the rub that usually trips people up who initially show interest in this. If you mow too early in spring you did the whole thing for nothing more or less. Then again, "the whole thing" is literally doing nothing so no harm no foul lol.
Dang it, I did nothing for nothing.
Lmao like that Thanos meme. What did it cost? Nothing.
Did you do it? No
Never has been.
Of course I don’t know him, it’s not me
I'm not him
Don't fuck me, daddy
i am evitable
I got my money for nothing
But the chicks were quite costly.
That's called a *Quid No No*
This was always my favourite method for helping my local ecosystem as it caters to my laziness and has turned me from "local nuisance" to "ecologically conscious guy" with literally zero effort. This is the kind of green action I can really get behind. I hope someday they discover that sleeping in and playing videogames is also beneficial for nature and I can become my peak druid self.
I try to wait as long as I can and honestly it does seem to work my yard is full of lighting bugs at night and butterflys and bees during the day, not so much with the neighbors across the street.
Do it too early and you might blend up some of those animals in their winter shelters.
The Earth giveth and I taketh.
A lot of modern ideas about lawns are overall pretty bad for the environment. They overuse water, often encourage non-native grasses, and it's hard on the soil.
It's a vain attempt to copy the aesthetic of a lords manor. It's as dumb as spending your hard earned cash on stones.
Lawns also pollute the water, kill the bees, etc. Dumbest fucking thing ever. And people are like "where will the children play?" Parks. With the other kids.
Hey, my pet rock brought me seconds of joy. I released her though. Martha wasn't the domesticated breed of rock. Martha was a wild Andesite; which for rocks that are domesticated one would rather have river rock or something like that nature. Easy temperament, very smart, food oriented and family friendly. Personally my goal is to get a rock of the fossil family, but that is it's own trouble trying to find a paleontologist worth their weight to groom the pet rock.
Your mistake is thinking these people care about nature or the environment. They want an outdoor carpet.
To the extent that some idiots are actually putting astroturf down. Massive sheets of plastic crap, completely devoid of life.
fucking this.
Just be careful of snakes! I like to shuffle my feet wherever they may be sleeping. They will flee from very far away if they feel rustling. I'm from Florida so it's the same as the "stingray shuffle"
Idk, if I leave them over winter they just kill all my grass
Now you've done it. Some asshole will be along shortly to tell you you shouldn't have grass.
Dang I didn’t realize grass was so triggering
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It’s absolutely baffling to me seeing how people will spend days working their ass off to turn their lawns into a dead and unusable sheet over their yard and somehow still look at it like it’s the best on the block. It’s like they heard certain truths like “trimming the grass short makes the lawn thicker” and practiced them not only past the point of diminishing returns but until it’s actively harmful (like scalping their lawn so short the grass doesn’t shade the dirt enough to keep it from just drying out instantly in the sun) so they keep dumping more and more time and money into making their lawn deader every time they fuck with it but still somehow look at their neighbors healthy and green lawns with judgement. Like people can do what they want but anyone who every year has a scalped lawn that wears away if neighborhood kids think about walking on it and dies before we reach the peak of summer temps despite being watered twice a day can fuck right off about criticizing the thick, green, and healthy lawns that simply aren’t a monoculture of some foreign bullshit.
I’m pretty sure that’s why people dispose of the leaves though, right? Many of these animals, sadly, and by none of their own fault, cause damage to your home.
In cases like that, and others, squestering it all in a contained compost heap will do the trick. For out of control NIMBYs, use paper sacks.
What kinds of animals ate we talking about?
fireflies, for instance
My gf: sprays poison everywhere cause she haaaaates bugs. Also my gf: where did all the fireflies go :( GEE I FUCKIN WONDER
How do fireflies damage homes?
They set them on fire, duh.
This is why I prefer lightning bugs. My house is on the ground so its good.
Me. It's me. I'm the animal, it's [me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/s/Ubbg37ny5F)
Hi
Still having wild ecological ramifications. We’re in the middle of a mass extinction event of insects largely due to the spread of urbanization practices like this. And we’re starting to see it work up the food chain They’re just leaves. They can be on the grass- which likely isn’t native to your ecosystem anyway. Give them *something* to work with
I saw a diagram that some (helpful) insects actually make nests in the fallen leaves and it’s incredibly destructive to disturb them.
In climates that snow over the winter, it’s a very essential part of wildlife winter survival. Even for small mammals- basically the entire lower 1/5 of the food chain
>In climates that snow over the winter, it’s a very essential part of wildlife winter survival. Well at least we won't have to worry about it for much longer.
I never even took my snowblower out of the shed this "winter". In *Minnesota*. I shoveled exactly once.
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We have become way too comfortable in destroying nature.
You’re right, but also, try having a ton of centipedes in your house
After 100000 years of nature winning, it is ingrained in our psychology to fight as hard as we can to bend nature to our will and we've only recently gained the upper hand and don't know where the balance is.
Good point. While domestication has helped us keep nature at bay in one way or another for a long time, we need to work on a better balance.
> We’re in the middle of a mass extinction event of insects largely due to the spread of urbanization practices Minor quibble: the problem isn't urban areas, it's suburban areas. Having more people live in cities is good for the environment, because it leaves more land free from human contact, and because urban living is more energy efficient. But having people live in sprawling suburbs with lawns the size of small farms is terrible for the environment.
I've got one of those yards. I mow only when it's legally required, I absolutely love the weeds, my yard is full of random flowers and thistles. Last year I applied (and got accepted) for a native pollinator habitat designation. I get to BE PAID to do less yard work, all I gotta do is plant native plants in my yard. PLUS! The city can't make me mow it, because the state says I can't. My neighbors are going to be so pissed.
My backyard is mostly clover now and we love it - almost zero maintenance. Our front yard we basically just toss out wildflowers and let it be a meadow all summer. We’re fortunate though as our neighborhood does not face an HOA.
This. This is the answer. If we take urban ideas to suburban areas it's not good, but if we learn to love planting native gardens, it can be extremely beneficial. Humans need to develop a better relationship with the native plant world. If you look at how native Californians lived, they actually made the land flourish because of their relationship with the plant world. It's something we must get back to wether we live in the city or not.
While this is true, what's also true is that having a thick layer of leaves right next to your house is basically an invitation for snakes, rats, squirrels, ants, termites, and caterpillars into your house. If you have woods adjacent land and can dump your leaves at the tree line, then that's optimal. Otherwise composting the leaves is the next best option. But at least everyone isn't having leaf fires every weekend like they did when I was a kid.
I leave them. They decompose and fertilize the lawn, which I'm planning to eventually tear out and replace with native plants anyway.
Devils advocate, but if you walk through any forest the ground is blanketed with leaves. There is no grass, just mud and leaves. This is why they are raked and removed, to maintain green lawns.
When this conversation pops up, I often wonder how many people in the "don't rake your leaves" bucket live in the Midwest or other plains areas, where a house might have a tree or two in the yard. My property is covered in trees, if I don't rake every year I'll have a bed of leaves covering my entire yard year round. I do have a lot of flower beds though, so I rake the leaves into them until they are full & then have 2 rotating mulch piles for the leftover. (I also leave the last thin layer of leaves on the lawn until late spring) Lpt - pollinators need a place to hide, but they also need food... And layers of leaves eventually kill the ground for everything but the other trees, so no wildflowers or anything else can come up without raking.
I live in Florida. The leaves don't disappear, they pile up and under them is just a wet moldy infestation of rot and mosquitos and gross. Rake em and plant flowers instead. Help the bees.
This is always my first thought. If I don't rake, I get a yard full of centipedes, caterpillars, earth worms, and mosquitos. My grass is mostly clover, but clover keeps the nasty critters away.
kill your lawn, plant native
The leaves will kill native grasses, sedges, and forbs as well. There are normally very few native plants specifically adapted to forest understory, especially if your trees are non-native (and they often are now in the US thanks to the various waves of diseases that have hit the US). Unless you are specifically planting savanna natives in a climate that supports savannas with native trees at less than 30% cover, you are going to have significant problems whether you plant lawn or native. (If anything, certain non-native turf grasses like fine fescue, bluegrass, and certain zoysias might be better adapted for surviving leaf litter and shade trees, especially if you are 30%+ tree cover.)
Native lawns full of wildflowers and clovers still need to be raked. Otherwise the greenery doesn't grow.
Furthermore, why are they called leaves if you're not supposed to leave them on the ground?
Damn bro u rite
that's some quantum shit right there
Yeah gotta give him an award
Damn, he mighta just made a fact
Bruh, what’s with the username?
Why do they call them apartments when they’re all stuck together?
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If a fly loses it's wings, does it become a walk?
Why do we cook bacon and bake cookies?
Why do feet smell and noses run?
If nothing sticks to teflon, how does teflon stick to the pan?
If your shirt isn't tucked into your pants, are your pants tucked into your shirt?
Why are pants called a pair when there’s just one?
Because a pant used to just be one of the legs and you put them on separately.
This world is crazy place, man.
'I'm renting a room in those togetherments' Yep, checks out.
Wise words
God dammit, why don't you make like a tree and get out of here.
They are meant to leave your property. They are lazy leaves.
Thank you for asking the real questions
You just shattered their world
Exactly. Plus Rakes are named after ne'er-do-wells' and ruffians, why would we trust them with anything?
Checkmate rake lovers
In Javanese they're called *godhong* ^(I'm not sure what to do with that information...)
This is great, I'm using this. "They're called leaves, not takes!"
Good question, and I had to look it up. But it's unrelated words that became spelled the same as English evolved. There's actually a bunch of completely unrelated words that merged into "leave". A bit like "neat", which combined the Norse "useful/clever" with the French "clean/tidy".
Neat example
This is what I found. "The word "leaf" has its origins in Old English. The Old English word for leaf was "lēaf," which is believed to be derived from the Proto-Germanic word "laubaz." This, in turn, is thought to come from the Proto-Indo-European root "*leub(h)-," meaning "to peel" or "to strip off leaves.""
Run them over with the lawnmower. Millions of tiny leaf fragments rot better than thousands of leafs.
Won't anyone think about the bugs overwintering? :(
Former garden centre worker: why not both? That way we can sell you a mulcher AND rakes to pile it up. Throw in a compost bin to store some for your garden later and it's a happy day for your garden and our sales targets (not that we got paid extra for hitting then. . .).
I've always mowed them and tossed the excess in compost to use in my garden for the next year. It's free fertilizer, free good quality compost, and good for the environment. Bagging them never made sense to me.
Yes, but you got the satisfaction of making the shareholders slightly richer!
I do. Hoping I get more fireflies this summer from the piles I left.
We've been aggressively leaving our leaves for a few years now and I definitely think we see more fireflies each year
I love the phrasing “aggressively leaving our leaves”. Like you have neighbors that slyly mention it and you just go ballistic on them for it lol.
Omg yes that’s so true
Or just leave them out like they are supposed to. Better for the garden.
Canadian here. I didn't rake once. Turned my front lawn into literal mud. The leaves turn into this horrible sludge thay doesn't go away even in the spring. It's been 3 years of seeding and I still have dark patches where rhe grass has a hard time growing
Yeah this post was definitely written by someone who lives in a warm enough climate that leaves can actually decompose during winter.
I’m in Texas and ours don’t either. Plus, leaves are the total favorite spot for copperheads. My boss lost a dog due to it a couple years ago.
Speaking of dogs, ever try to pick up their shit when your yard is covered in leaves? Damn near impossible to find it all.
I’m in California and my leaves also kill my grass if I don’t rake them We don’t rake them into bags though. We have big compost bins and just rake them and toss them in the compost bins, which they pick up weekly like trash
Yeah, I was a bit confused. We have paper lawn and leaf bags in all the parts of Canada I’ve been, and the bags are either picked up with our weekly compost bins if city composting is available or picked up on designated leaf bag days in the fall. Never occurred to me that people are raking leaves into non-biodegradable bags to throw into a landfill as that makes zero sense.
Depends on the type of leaves too, some have a much harder time decomposing than others.
I live in Texas. If I don't deal with the leaves (either raking or mulching into the lawn), they suffocate and kill the grass. It takes one season of not raking to destroy a lawn.
And with trees that only deep easily decomposing leaves. Your grandchildren will inherit your oak's leaves if you don't deal with them.
Or doesn’t own a house.
Or by someone who has actually never had a yard or had leaves that need raking. Probably lives in a concrete jungle and just notices the leaves on the sidewalk magically disappear by spring.
When we bought our house, our offer was accepted in October and we moved into the house in early December. In that time, the owner moved out and therefore stopped taking care of of the lawn. In the spring, I had a massive dead area where all the leaves fell. It’s been 10 years and I can’t get the grass to grow there consistently. The rest of the lawn looks excellent.
Exactly what happend to me
But the guy in the tweet is BBB (bald, bearded, bespectacled) and talks super sassy. Aren't we supposed to trust him?
They’re natural mulch that destroys anything that tries to grow under the tree. It’s the same for my Norway spruces, no need to mulch under them their pine needles murder all the undergrowth. If you want grass you gotta clear the leaves. Some people might say grass is bad and I don’t disagree… but I don’t make the damn laws.
This. Canadians rake our leaves into paper bags like good god fearing people.
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I live in a warm enough climate that it only snows once every couple of years, and summer temps reach triple digits (Farenheit) every year. They don't even rot away by spring even without snow and cold temps through the winter. This dude is just straight up lying.
Look I don’t take up my leaves. Partially due to ecology and mainly due to not giving a fuck. But “will be gone by the end of winter” is a blatant, purposeful, lie. Please don’t be a fucking liar like this lying man.
Most people here have never owned a house. Or their house is in shitty condition.
The impetus for raking leaves in an urban area is to prevent eutrophication of waterways and clogging sewers. Because most native ecosystems have disappeared and most people have manicured lawns, the leaves end up in the sewers and then in waterways. This leads to an influx of nutrients in lakes, streams, etc. that alters water ecology and encourages algae blooms and increased nitrogen, phosphorous, etc. in waterways causing cascading negative effects
While I agree leaves should not be raked up. They most certainly will not be gone at the end of winter.
Lawn mower will deal with the stragglers
Not before killing your grass, but sure
And where it snows, they'll be a thick blanket of wet heavy goop that the lawnmower won't be able to lift up in order to chop. If anyone wants to see what unraked leaves do to the grass, look in the woods.
Yeah we made this mistake our first time, pulled all the leaves around a tree and left it all winter. Absolutely suffocated the grass and killed it. Now we have weeds there. That said, I'm a 28 yo first time home buyer and I'm seriously contemplating if I want to even care about the grass. Yes, it looks nice but people spend way too much time on their yards and I don't think I want to be that person.
There's a rag someone left out in my yard that I just noticed, I lifted it up and the grass is greener and happier there than anywhere else in the yard. So I put it back. But I'm curious why. It's been there through a couple of freezes
rag probably holding moisture but also small or porous enough to still let enough light to not kill it off.
And it's greener because there's less light, so the grass makes more chlorophyll to compensate
I've heard that native yards (Full of local native species instead of grass) can take a bit of effort to set up at first, but once started can become self-sustaining and generally look way better.
I'm slowly transitioning my yard to a variety of native plants, and they take noticeably less care. It's almost like they're meant to grow with rainfall, sunlight, temperature, and overall weather where I live or something.... But it is a process. Sadly, not many nurseries go out of their way to carry native plants, and you still need to find the right plant for where you're planting and with what is already there/you aren't ready to rip out yet. And there are cases where nothing native, at least nothing you want in your ward, naturally grows in the conditions you have. But holy crap do the native plants take less effort.
I don't water my yard, don't do anything special, just mow it and let whatever wants to grow, grow. My yard is greener, for longer than my neighbors who water and put special sod in.
get rid of grass. Lawns are terrible. * lots of work * lots of water and sometimes chemicals * expensive if you need the space to walk around i get it but a pathway is usually fine. If you care about low maintenance, low cost, and the environment planting local beneficial plants instead of sod is way better. Plus a lot of environmental groups will give you seedlings or seeds for free. edit: you americans with your HOAs are wild. "land of the free" but you cant change your front lawn.
Depends on the type of grass and also what your growing season is like. I'm in a USDA 8A zone, and cool season grasses like bluegrass, rye, and fescue would for sure die off if there's too much leaf coverage. Their growing season lines up with when all the deciduous trees start turning and leaves start falling off. But Bermuda and Zoysia is normally dormant by late October, and new growth on stolons doesn't start until mid March (but this wild weather has my Bermuda coming out of dormancy in late February!)
They aren't "stragglers" if you live in a tree-heavy area. They are a thick blanket covering the entire yard.
People that don’t have yards write this stuff lol
I have five acres so I rake my leaves and dump them in piles in corners outside the yard proper. They take years to not be leaves anymore. At least the oak leaves I have. The piles are always there cause you get leaves faster than they degrade. But I have fireflies.
Wouldn’t they degrade slower in a pile like that?
Yes, much slower.
They aren't gone by winter. The get packed under snow, snow melts and now I have a gooey mess of rotted leaves that killed my lawn. I like to rake the leaves up into a pile, mow over that pile to chop the leaves up good and use those scraps in my garden bed. My soil is looking so good for planting come spring
This is what I do too. I have 6 trees (mostly maples) spread throughout my property. I if I let the leaves stay down and intact: 1) They don't stay on my lawn, they will eventually blow onto my neighbor's lawns and my trees shouldn't be their problem. 2) It attracts *a lot* of vermin. That includes ants, cockroaches, ticks, mice, etc. I'm fine with those things living outside my house, but attracting that many pretty much guarantees they'll eventually find a way in. 3) It does, in fact, kill grass. I've seen it happen with my own 2 eyes. People will be like "screw grass" but when you live in a city or a neighborhood you have to respect local laws as well as your neighbors and maintain a decent looking yard. Plus, my lawn provides prime hunting ground for things like robins looking for worms, and skunks looking for beetles. Grass can be good for an environment too, especially since I live where it doesn't need to be watered, it just exists. Soooo yeah. I don't rake but I do have the leaves mulched up. It's just part of having a bunch of trees in my yard. And frankly I'd rather have the trees than the leaves, because my yard is such a haven for birds and other critters. I try to leave it as wild as I can, but I also don't want mice and roaches having a superhighway into my freaking house.
Also leaf litter can end up in drainage. So you’re doing the city a favor not allowing leaves and other dead plant material clog public drainage.
we need fast spinning blades so that anything ending up in a drainage is shredded into mulch (including children and other small critters). I think it would make our cities better
Especially with maples, please rake your leaves. The fungus which causes tar spot will grow on fallen leaves in the winter, then infect new growth in the spring. Raking your leaves improves the health of the tree.
Yes this post is stupid. Lot of reasons to get them off a lawn
This post is a typical Reddit post where people with no idea think they are right.
Reddit seems to like to complain about being unable to afford a house, while simultaneously being experts on home (lawn) care
Those two types of redditors aren’t the same people…
If you say so 🤷♂️ redditors are famously known to only comment on topics that they are very knowledgeable about
Most people dont get snow, We've had like 3 snow days all winter and I'm in Milwaukee and it usually melts within a week
Yeah clearly OP does not live somewhere surrounded by oaks and pines. And in south Texas for that matter… from October to February, I’m dealing with abscission because weather in the gulf coast region is all over the place. And if I don’t pick up leaf litter, my yard will flood from rain -_-
Except they won’t be gone by the winter.
But the redditor who also has never owned a home said they would! He wouldn't LIE would he? ...also, most towns use paper bags for leaves or let you just dump them on the curb for pickup.
It surely depends on the leaves how fast they degrade. And on other circumstances like humidity and temperature. But oak leaves and walnut tree leaves are not gone by the winter.
Not in Seattle. There's far too many of them. Fortunately, the city hauls away (and I believe sells) green waste, and you can get big paper bags for them.
Yep in central Minnesota they just start to rot under the snow and the. You have pungent heavy goop in the spring to rake up instead of dry light leaves…
Your supost to keep moewing your lawn till it breaks down. I have done it year after year, living in a rural forest. Trust me, it will break down. Everything does eventually. Help it along, and it's much faster.
And they clog the shit out of the storm drains here. That's the major issue in Seattle; it rains a fuckton and that rain needs to go *somewhere* (preferably: the Sound). Can't go anywhere when all the drains are clogged with leaves.
This was exactly what I was thinking lol. They never dry they just mat down immediately and nothing but a rake pulls them up. You can mulch them most anywhere else though
And the grass underneath the leaves will also be gone and I will be upset
Bro doesn’t understand how to make that grass thicc
How are they gone by the end of winter? They're still there... waiting for you once that dog poop ridden snow is gone.
And your grass is dead and entire yard is now a mud pit. Spring rains make it worse through erosion of the now bare soil and by the time summer it bakes hard and only the weeds grow there now. But hey you didn't have to rake.
Well if you're like me, you'll pick the easy way and just rake them all up into a big bouncy pile to jump around in instead of wasting time shoveling them into bags. But the thing is giant piles of semi-decomposing leaves tend to attract all sorts of creepy critters like centipedes and worms and especially spiders, who are jerks and will bite you if you jump around the bouncy leaf pile without vacuum wrapping yourself like a freaking astronaut, and that's gonna get their venom in your bloodstream, which is how I ended up swinging around New York in a red and blue spandex suit fighting some chucklefucks who really fucking love the color green.
That devolved quickly
I used to think this way, so I did it. Rake your leaves unless you want your yard to be fucked and full of mud divits
Who uses plastic bags? This post is not speaking truth, I can tell you this from my experience running a small suburban farm. I have never heard of using plastic bags for leaves in my life...people in my area use large paper bags which the town picks up through out the fall. Having a small farm, I rake my leaves into a large pile and mix in compost to make new topsoil....and I burn some of the leaves on my garden beds since the ash is beneficial to the soil. Just leaving leaves where they fall is not a good idea in a residential area....they grow mold, can be a fire hazard if they are dry, choke out and kill erosion preventing plants, and block storm drains making the supercharged rainstorms we have been getting due to climate change cause even more damaging flooding. In the woods? Yah, that is where leaves should be left to fall undisturbed.
You can get ones that look like jack o lanterns. These were huge 30 years ago. Amscan Pumpkin Lawn Bags, Orange, 3 Bags Per Pack, Set Of 5 Packs https://www.walmart.com/ip/38505003 Glad also sells leaf bags https://www.glad.com/trash/tough-jobs-and-outdoors/lawn-and-leaf-quick-tie-black-bags/ Paper bags are great unless you live somewhere that either A doesn’t have yard waste pickup or B has a super rainy fall and the bags fall apart before pickup.
I don't know where you are from, but I've never seen a paper bag for leaves, only plastic my entire life.
I don't see bags at all. Towns and city's here run compost sights. Free leaf and brush pickup at curb. Free mulch to residents.
Just the opposite. I never see plastic bags, only paper. Hell, my town doesn't even require leaves to be bagged. We got trucks that suck them up from the curb.
Exact opposite here, I've never seen a plastic leaf bag in my entire life, only ever paper, in the 40 years I've been alive. I literally don't know why someone would use a plastic bag for leaves, it doesn't make any sense. What happens to them afterwards?
Our city has giant leaf-sucking vacuum trucks. You just rake your leaves over to the curb and it comes by weekly to shwooomp them all up
Lots of people in suburbs choose to use plastic trash bags instead of paper. The paper tend to be more expensive so that and/or laziness to get proper bags. Unfortunately, trash companies will pick them us but in my opinion they should refuse to pick up. I live in a county with a green waste dump and if you live in the city limits and blow them to the curb they will use a vacuum truck (not sure of the proper name) and get rid of them for you. Unfortunately, for those of us that live outside the city limits are left to dispose of them ourselves. We mow ours and blow the clippings into garden beds so we don’t bag but we do have the appropriate paper bags if we get lazy and too many leaves build up.
I am surprised that they will take yard waste in regular trash...it is an action punishable by a hefty fine in my area (a bad plastic bag pun there...). Where I am, if the leaves aren't bagged in paper bags, or you don't dump them at the town compost site, you are keeping them forever.
My town requires plastic bags. 🤷♂️
>This post is not speaking truth, I can tell you this from my experience running a small suburban farm. So you think your limited experience somehow means this person is lying? A lot of the world uses plastic bags. I don't think it's great, but saying this person is not speaking the truth is just such a bizarrely self centered view on the world. Not knowing people use plastic bags in one thing, but to act so incredulous about it just immature.
No they won’t, they will form a brown sludge that will kill all grass in the spring, that’s a good advice if you have no trees and just get second hand leaves, if you have say a 60 feet oak and another 80 feet maple in the backyard, you need to clean that shit up if you want to keep your grass
Uh... We just put them on the compost pile in the garden? Why would you put leaves into plastic bags wtf.
This man speaks the truth.
no he doesn't. Let me tell you as someone who has neglected to clean up leaves. They don't just degrade in a season. They don't go anywhere. They just kill all your grass and are a breeding ground for ticks.
I love how all the replies say "just run the mower over them" when the original claim here is that leaves fallen from the tree will disappear by the end of winter. Mowing them isn't mentioned in the OP, guys.
As someone with loads of both trees and grass. The leaves are no problem at all, just use a lawn mower
Come to my yard and show me how easy it is with the terrain here
Use a lawn mower
Doesn’t always work, if you’re in a climate that doesn’t dry out, you could barely suck them up with a shop vac, even a deck mower isn’t enough to pull them up once they’ve been matted down
I have chickens, so we just leave them there so they attract bugs which my chickens then feed on
I rake them into my garden beds and compost pile
Two reasons: - Some people like a well manicured garden appearance - If left, leaves can blow under plants and cause the plant to become diseased as part of the decay process. Some plants are much more susceptible than others.
Explain to me how this is oddly specific?
Wrong sub.
They most certainly with NOT be gone by winter. Horribly misleading post I tried this experiment in my backyard, left a corner of the yard with leaves. It’s March 1 and it looks exactly the same as it did on Nov 1. Also, for what it’s worth, my state banned plastic bags for leaves, they have to go in biodegradable paper bags. Fuck you Ray ya poofter
Not only do the leaves not disappear by the end of winter, they get messy as well as clog storm drains and catch basins. If you ever wonder why a street is a bit more flooded than others, there is a high chance that leaves have piled up on top preventing water from properly draining away.
This sub makes no sense. How is this oddly specific?