LEAVING LEAVES

Ah… October, my favorite month. I love the weather, I love the colors, I love it, love it, love it.

But every October, I notice a strange trend among ‘yon city folks amidst whom I dwell. They have this strange custom of raking leaves every fall, bagging them up and sending them to the city dump.

This, to me, makes no sense.

I have always figured that, in the city, folks have no “real” work to do, so they make work out of their lawns. They rake, they prune, they buy mulch and all kinds of scary chemicals. Maybe they’re just bored, or maybe they really don’t know any better. All the neighbors are doing it…

I refuse to rake leaves—I mean, it’s just silly. When the leaves are formed, they require nutrients which are sent up from the roots of the tree. When the leaves fall, they decompose and return those nutrients back into the soil to be used again for the same purpose next year. The decomposing leaves provide nutrients for the soil, grass, trees, shrubs and flowering plants that people seem to like in their yards. So why starve the poor things?

Perhaps it is all a trick from Chem Lawn. If you take away all the natural nutrients, it follows that you’ll eventually have to replace them with synthetic ones. If you let nature make it’s own food, then nobody makes a buck.

I’ve heard all kinds of stories as to why it is so necessary to rake leaves – people actually believe that they HAVE to do it, whether they want to or not. The most common story is that the leaves will kill the grass. Um, yeah. I grew up in the middle of the woods with grass surrounding the house. We NEVER raked leaves and we ALWAYS had grass.

By this logic, grass would have been an endangered species before the White Man came with his garden rakes to save the poor, buried little plants. When Columbus landed, America was covered by dead leaves, miles deep. Nothing would grow – it was a desolate waste land where no grasses could thrive. Thank heavens the pilgrims brought over Hefty Bags and leaf blowers on the Mayflower…

Sure, if you take a huge pile of leaves and set it in one place, the grass underneath is unlikely to grow well the following spring. (If you just let them lay where they land, this is unlikely to happen, especially if you mow over them.) This effect, however, can be a very good thing. Remember all the mulch that folks buy to cover the roots of their flowers to avoid weeds and keep the moisture near the soil during the dry summer months? Leaves work just as well, and they’re free.

Another story I've heard goes as such... "I think raking leaves is silly, but if I didn't do it, my neighbors would complain." Now, maybe this is true, but perhaps EVERYONE feels this way and that is the only reason that they do it. Maybe my neighbor rakes leaves because she believes I will be upset if she doesn't, then in turn I rake my leaves because she does, believing she would be upset, etc.. Does anyone really care? Or are they all just succumbing to perceived peer pressure to conform?

The whole idea of raking leaves and hauling them off cracks me up, but even funnier than that are the people who start raking as soon as the first leaf falls. They’re out in their yards every other day raking up every little piece of dried vegetable matter that hits their grass. Heaven forefend that one of the little buggers might actually sit there and pollute the yard with any wayward nutrients. Quick – get the plastic garbage bags and get these things out of here before they decompose!

We have several large trees in our yard (one oak is estimated to be around three hundred and fifty years old) and therefore A LOT of leaves. We wait until they have ALL dropped, which sometimes means the end of November, but usually means early the next spring. We pile enough of them together along the fence to keep the weeds from coming up between our bushes, then put another bunch of them over the space where the garden will be tilled. This keeps the weeds down, as well as giving the garden space an extra dose of nutrition. Then we run the mulching mower over the rest of them, thus dispersing their nutritional value to the rest of the yard and chewing them into bite-sized pieces so that the yard can more easily “eat” them.

Voila. Free mulch, free fertilizer, and no it doesn’t kill our grass. If we don’t do this at all, no big whoop. We do it not because we “have” to, but because it just makes sense to most fully utilize and "arrange" the gifts that nature was so good as to deposit in our yard.

We also get a layer of pine needles all over our front sidewalk every fall, which we diligently do not sweep. Come the first hard freeze, the ice peels right up without any straining or scraping. Ice sticks to concrete – it does not stick to pine needles.

I’ve never really understood the whole idea of wrapping organic vegetable matter in plastic rather than just letting it decompose naturally. All the banana, potato and carrot peels, every apple core, unused onion part and bag of peaches I forgot about in the back of the crisper goes straight and unadulterated into the back yard. Four years ago we couldn’t get anything to grow along our fence because the lawn had been totally leeched of nutrients and over-chemicalized. Now we have a thriving bed of bamboo (yes, the roots are contained) because of throwing this kind of waste in that area rather than wrapping it in plastic and sending it to the local landfill.

I looked on the internet to see if anyone could give me a rational sounding reason to rake my leaves, but to no avail. I found that the “correct” way to rake leaves involves raking deeply so that the dead grass or thatch is raked up as well. However, if your lawn mower is doing its job, there shouldn’t be any thatch. Of course, if the chemicals have killed all of the critters and bacteria necessary to break down the organic matter, then I suppose it might be another story.

I also heard some vague notion that leaves left alone “breed pests and disease.” Again, this goes back to the whole idea of Lawn as Pristine Sanitary Place Outside of Nature. Oh no! We might support an ecosystem! Get those pests off of my lawn – they might make something decompose!

Some places at least suggested that it might be wiser to compost than to have the leaves hauled away, but still often recommended raking them all into a plastic composter (another large and costly item), mixing them with nitrogen, turning them every two weeks, etc., etc., Though this does make a tasty fertilizer (especially when mixed with other ingredients like sheep dung, coffee grounds, egg shells, etc.), it is not strictly necessary. The leaves will decompose whether or not the core temperature reaches 130 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit, especially if they are run over by the mower a couple of times.

The two most numerous kinds of articles surrounded community leaf raking projects and suggestions on how to not injure one’s self while raking. Of course, raking is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY – there was never any question about that in these articles. However, people are often injured (and sometimes die) doing it, so there are hundreds of tips regarding correct posture, stretching techniques, and how to monitor the heart to make sure that you’re not on the brink of cardiac arrest. And, if you find yourself too physically challenged to spend the hours “required” doing this, luckily there are many community charity organizations who will come and help you out.

In my internet search, I found exactly one article about a sixty-eight year old man who called into a radio show to discuss how ridiculous the suburban leaf raking cult was. For many of the same reasons I’ve listed, he discussed how leaving them there is actually better for the yard and the environment in general, not to mention a whole lot easier. But, nevertheless, every autumn the city comes by and picks up all the leaves folks leave on their front stoop, despite the all around silliness of the whole ordeal.

I just don’t get people with their lawns… They want a “green space,” but apparently it has to be this one particular shade of green with only this species of plant and has to be exactly 1.672 inches long to be appropriate. And for heavens sake – do not let anything decompose on it! We’ll just call the chemical company in the spring to lay down a layer of synthetic fertilizer, weed killer and pesticide. Won’t that be nice?

Way back when, people coined the phrase “leaf raking” to denote projects (usually government sponsored) which were basically unnecessary busy work. This phrase was popular back in the middle of the last century, but apparently no one remembers it today. As with most things, as long as people believe that they “have to” rake their leaves, they will continue to do so.

And that’s just fine by me. I’ll happily lounge in the backyard drinking cider with my feet propped up and watch them, while the leaves in my yard decompose all by themselves as they’ve been doing for millions of years.