Leave Your Leaves & Leave Your Stems

Help your native insect, pollinator, bee, and caterpillar friends survive the winter; don't remove  the leaves and stems that grew on your property this year.

This is going to save you a ton of time!

We have been learning more and more about the importance of emulating our natural forests and prairies to protect overwintering insects.

Learn more at MinnesotaGardening.com.

Transcript

 All right. Hello. And welcome my friend to the Minnesota Gardening Podcast. It is my honor to have you here today where we are going to talk about fall cleanups. And I really don't have a whole lot to say about this other than just don't do it. Like leave your leaves, leaves the stems on all your plants and you're set.

You are good to go. So I know this is a really controversial take in some in some. Circles, I totally understand it because everybody's worried about their leaves blowing into their neighbor's houses and those kinds of things, but over time, as you start to remove turf and add more and more plants, native plants to your landscape to help to support your pollinator friends, to help your bees, to help your save water, to help eliminate chemicals in your yard, The more plants you put out there, the less and less you have to worry about leaves and things blowing around and that because you'll have some boundaries and some some processes set up so that those leaves just won't blow into your neighbors very much.

And you can talk to them about why it's important to leave your leaves and go from there and hopefully everything will be awesome and cool with everybody. But in general, leave your leaves, leave your stems, don't do much of anything for fall cleanup. And so we'll get a little bit more into that here.

It's really important. There's been a ton of research that's been done over the course of really the last decade to really look at how a lot of insects, pollinators, other friends chrysalises, larvae, all overwinter in leaf flowers. Litter as in, it's really self explanatory as you think about the forest, you think about how the leaves fall at the base of the trunks in the forest.

And then that's where all those friends live and where they overwinter. They have a lot of really cool processes that happen that basically give them antifreeze and they go into states over the winter that they just. Hang and they, they, some of them freeze solid even. It's a fascinating way we should have a entomologist on the podcast to talk about overwintering insects in our areas, but a lot of bees live under the leaves and a lot of friends go down in that area.

And so what happens when, what We have, what I have previously advocated for handling leaves is to take your mower and go over them a couple of different times and shred them. So they fall down into the grass and they, they keep sunlight on the grass and they keep the, all the nutrients and everything in their place.

But what that missed out is this understanding of that. There are a lot of overwintering friends that are in there. And when we shred those leaves, we shred those friends as well. And we don't want to do that. So what we want to do is basically just leave the leaves where they fall down. There's grass, as long as a little bit of your grass is showing through the leaves, your grass isn't going to die.

And so your grass will be just fine. If you're nervous about it, you can get a rake out, or you can get a battery powered blower out. And blow those leaves into your bed. So take and move those leaves into your landscape beds. Hopefully, my friend, you don't have rock beds because rock beds are just terrible.

And they don't allow any organic material to fall through and to work into them. So you want to make sure to be removing that rock and putting in landscape beds that you can use hardwood mulch. And even better, you can have a couple inches of layer of leaf just to emulate. And mimic what happens in the forest and you can have that in there.

So anytime we take all of these leaves off of our properties what happens is that they go to a compost facility and all those insects that are living in there that are the things that the next year we'll be feeding all the chickies, feeding all the blue jays, feeding all of the other frogs and toads and all of the friends that keep our local ecosystem moving, they will all go and they will die in a compost facility.

And so what you want to do is you want to Keep them at your property. And the same thing with all of the stems and things from your, you know, Ligularis and from your Joe pie weeds and from your day lilies and from your hostas even, and all of those friends leave those there because there are tons of insects, especially native Minnesota bees that live in the stems of those.

Plants, it's the overwinter in those stems of those plants and then in the spring they will emerge from there And so you want to make sure to leave the leaves and leaves all the stems on your property So think about it as like rainwater the goal with stormwater management right now Is a really good goal is to keep all that stormwater on the property So it's not overwhelming any systems and moving things around and dispersing disease and those kinds of things So what?

What you want to do is keep all those leaves as an asset on your property. And so what do you do if you don't have enough room for your leaves? And so you can like I said, take and move those into the landscape beds. If you don't have enough room to put your leaves in the landscape beds, you should A, make more landscape beds because that is the cool way to do it.

But B, you can take and pile those leaves in, make a compost pile, someplace on the corner of your lot or wherever you are. If you have some space, you can take and make a pile of those leaves and wet them down. And then they won't blow around very much at all. And they will compost and they will do really good.

And so you can use that and your as. mulching in your food gardening beds. Next spring, you can use those in your landscape beds. After everything starts to break down, you can combine those into your food beds to add more organic material and nutrients into there and do a lot of really, really great things with those.

So that's how you can handle the leaves. When they're, when you have too many of them on your property, you can give them to your neighbors as well. So I know I have some friends looking at you, JVF, who has just, A ton of oak trees on the property, which is awesome, but they also are really difficult to deal with.

And so try these steps. Let me know how it goes. And we will go from there. So the moral of the story and then the topic of the podcast today is to take and make the world a better place. Leave your leaves on your property, leaves your stems on your property. So you can help our pollinator friends thrive and succeed in our local ecosystem.

So if you have any questions, we have a lot more information at minnesotagardening. com. And I invite you over there to check things out. Also, we have a brand new course called landscape maintenance for new homeowners. So if you go on minnesotagardening. com, click on landscape for new homeowners and you can check out that course.

It's 97. It's really great course. People are loving it. For an introductory for homeowners to better understand how to maintain their landscape. It's got design guidelines for using native plants on landscapes, how to plant a tree, how to apply fertilizer, how much fertilizer to use, those kinds of things.

So I know that a lot of folks are enjoying it and I know you will too. So I will talk to you next week. Have a wonderful rest of your day and thank you so much. Go Twins!