Yard Waste Is Not Waste

“Free yard waste drop-off” sounds like a win, but it raises a bigger question: why are we creating yard waste at all? We look at the leaves, grass clippings, stems, and small branches we’ve been trained to bag and haul away and show why they’re actually nutrients, carbon, mulch, and habitat your yard needs.

We talk about how tidy-lawn culture turns a yard into a factory where inputs come in and outputs go out. The cost shows up as compacted soil, weak biology, more runoff, and a constant need for watering and fertilizer. Then we flip the script and use nature as the blueprint: forests and prairies don’t “clean up” their organic debris, they recycle it. When we keep organic matter on site, soil life rebounds, water infiltrates better, roots grow stronger, and the whole landscape becomes more resilient and easier to maintain.

You’ll get a clear, practical checklist for sustainable lawn care and eco-friendly landscaping: leave grass clippings with a mulching mower, use chop and drop for perennials, keep leaves in beds or make leaf mold, skip unnecessary power raking, build a compost pile, create brush piles for overwintering insects, mulch with what you already have, and plant the right plant in the right place to reduce pruning. We also cover the few times material should leave your property, like diseased plants, invasive weeds, or volumes too large to process.

If you want better soil health, fewer chores, and a yard that supports pollinators and birds, press play. Subscribe, share this with a neighbor who loves a leaf blower, and leave a review with the one habit you’re ready to stop.

Learn more about getting your own Rebel Garden at ABetterYard.org.

Transcript

Welcome And The Big Idea

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello and good morning, my friend. Welcome back to a Better Yard podcast where we're building healthier neighborhoods, quietly one yard at a time. So today I want to talk about something that's just been one of those things that's just been like gnawing at the edge of my brain over the course of the last week. And I was driving the other day and saw an ad for a local composting facility, which is wonderful. And they were promoting free yard waste drop-off. So yes, yard waste drop-off. And that's great. For folks that need it, that's a really wonderful thing. But it got me thinking about it. It's super helpful. Uh it's better than sending things to a landfill, better than burning it, and better than dumping it illegally for sure. But it got me thinking about there really should be no such thing as yard waste. It should not be something our yards should be thriving, they should be full of life, and they should be giving nutrients and organic material back to our soils and helping that reproduce and keep going. Uh, and it should not be waste. But in most cases, what we call yard waste today is actually some sort of valuable material on our property. So it's things like leaves, grass clippings, plant stems, little branches, organic debris. These are not waste products. They're actually nutrients. They are organic material, they are carbon, they are mulch, they are giving us the ability to retain moisture, they are habitat for our birds and for our pollinators, and they are future soil. And so every time we bag these things up and haul them away, we are taking fertility from our yards and exporting it somewhere else, and then often buying products back in the forms of mulch and compost and fertilizer and other soil amendments to replace what we just left, took off of our property. And so today I want to talk about that yard waste concept, and I think it's broken thinking and give you a practical checklist for eliminating yard waste from your property. So for decades, and we talk about this here at a better yard all the time. So for decades, homeowners are sold an image of cleanliness, of tidiness, of perfectly clean lawns, of beds of mulch with no leaves and no sticks and no seed heads, and no sign of life outside of just your lawn and those perfectly trimmed hedges and shrubs. And this is what the homeowner vision looked like. And to maintain that look, we created this massive system of removal. So we mow it and we bag it, we rake it and we bag it, we cut it down and we haul it out and we blow it into the curb, and we tuck it all away. And it is no surprise whatsoever that our soils have ended up lifeless and dry and compacted and dependent on fertilizer and water and other inputs into our ground in order to just make things live. And so nature doesn't work this way. It doesn't export everything and then import new uh inorganic materials. In a forest, nothing is wasted. Leaves fall and then they become soils. So stems decompose, nutrients cycle. Organic material builds year after year to build glorious, amazing soil that grows a lot of life. And your yard can do that too. Here at a better yard, we want to emulate nature as much as we possibly can. So leaves fall and they stay where they are. We've got uh plants that grow and they stay where they are. And there are ways where we can do all of this together and emulate nature and make sure that we're making the world a better place. So when you keep organic material on your property, really good things happen. So what happens is your soil starts to gain organic material that means for better water infiltration and less runoff and improved drought tolerance and healthier roots for those plants, which means healthier tops for those plants, which you get better blooms, you get better things that are aesthetically pleasing, and they serve our ecosystem a lot better. And so, as you are doing this and letting this cycle work, after a couple of years, your soil biology begins to improve. And earthworms and fungi and bacteria and beetles and all the little guys in the soil start to get that ecosystem moving and need food in their yard. Your yard debris is that food. And so, with all of this, you are reducing your labor. You have less bagging, less hauling, less trips to the dump, less fuel costs, less uh garbage removal, and you reduce those costs for yourself and for our ecosystem, not just our local birds and butterflies and pollinators, but also our economic ecosystem. And we aren't putting money into things that we don't need to be putting money into. And so you buy less mulch, you buy less compost, you buy less fertilizer, and you build resilience in your yard by leaving those materials where they're supposed to be. So a yard with functioning functioning nutrient cycle is stronger, healthier, and easier to maintain in the long term. So here are some things that I highly recommend you doing in order to eliminate yard waste in your home yard. And so, first one is super simple. I really, really hope you were doing this as it is anyway. But number one is leave those grass clippings on your lawn. So never bag your grass clippings unless there is some sort of unusual, crazy circumstance. You want to uh make sure that you are always bagging those grass clippings, they are left, it just is 11 days from the time that you cut that grass to a time it gets into the ground and decomposes, and those nutrients are cycled back into your actual lawn. And so clippings are mostly water and nitrogen, and they break down quickly and feed the lawn naturally. You want to make sure that you are mulching those grass clippings instead of bagging them, and this is absolutely the easiest win in all of our lawn care because you reduce the amount of fertilizer that you need, and that does a lot of really great things for your lawn. When it comes to cutting back perennials and garden plants, you want to chop those stems and leave them in smaller pieces and drop them right in the bed. You don't need to remove them, you don't need to get them off of your property. You can chop them and leave them right there where they are. And so I recommend about halfway is the easiest way to do it in the spring. So cut them back about halfway. If you want things tidy, you don't have to cut anything back at all. But if you want things to be a little cleaner and you want to not show all the old stems, you can cut those back about halfway and just leave them on the ground. That way, any bugs or friends that are living in those stems are able to continue to emerge right in the place where those eggs were laid, and so that helps that life cycle there. But it also chopping actually does help a lot of our insect friends because it opens up those hollow stems from the last year's plants that are able to then get in those hollow stems and lay eggs and uh do those things. So it's a really good thing to do for our pollinator, especially our native bee friends. So use the chop and drop method for your perennials and grasses. So keep the leaves on site. Where those leaves drop, just let them be as much as possible. And if you have more leaves than you have beds, make some more beds and get some more there. And so it I have a lot of folks who are concerned about leaves blowing around because their neighbors are really tidy and they're very clean on everything. If you are having that problem, then make sure to have enough beds where you can either put beds on the edges of your property so that those leaves get caught in those beds. And I'll put a picture of what my beds look like because they have leaves there that are fully stuck in those landscape beds because we leave the stems and those catch the leaves and they keep them from blowing around all year long. So you can make sure just to blow those leaves off of your lawn directly into your landscape beds, and it does a really great thing. So if you have too many, create leaf mold piles or compost them. Do everything possible to keep your leaves on your property because they are gold. Next one is stop power raking and dethatching. It is not a thing that is necessary on our lawns. Uh, in the upper Midwest A, we don't have thatch. It's just not a thing that we have in our climate. The thatch is really a southern climate kind of issue. But power raking also does the same thing, is it removes nutrients from the soil, and it is a really bad thing to be doing to our lawns. And so that adds to erosion, and it most lawns just need better mowing and better watering and aeration if you need to, not power raking and detaching. Number five is build a compost pile. If you don't have a compost pile, it's a really good thing to do. And so not only can you put like kitchen scraps and other things like that in your compost pile, but you can anything that you have that is extra on your property, you can keep on your property and then use those for fertilizing and compost on your yard. And so it's a really good thing. So just start piling leaves and uh green material as you have them. If you have things that you need to cut back, go ahead and do those and um use those in the compost pile. So you keep that there on your property. Number six is use branches creatively. So if you have a storm or if you have cut some things down, um, you can haul those into a pile. So make a brush pile that is really good habitat for a lot of overwintering insects. So a lot of moths and butterflies overwinter in the sticks and in the leaves that are on the ground, and they also create really great habitat for many different critters, and so it's a very good thing to have brush piles uh and tucked away spaces on your property. And so I have like a spiral of sticks that are around the base of an oak tree, and so it's just a spiral. I like it. It's got a uh it's got some form and some function to it, and so it also holds the leaves and keeps those from blowing around on the property as well, and so it's a very good thing. So stick piles, use those branches if you prune some shrubs back, you can keep those, and you can keep doing using those for habitat for our friends. So mulch with what you have already. This one gets to be a little more difficult, but if you are somewhere that has pine trees or evergreen trees, and those pine needles are perfect for mulching. So you don't need to add more mulch to your property. You can have uh green mulch where if you have dense enough plantings that you don't need to have mulch in there. It's uh mulching is something that we, I think, over the last decade or so have really learned is not necessarily something that we have to be doing as much as we have always been doing that. And so there are some times when mulch is necessary and a good thing to do, but it is uh definitely not needed to have yards and yards and yards of mulch like we used to do. So use leaves, use pine needles, use spruce needles, use whatever you've got on your property. You can even use grass clippings, especially in your garden. Grass clippings are really great for mulch in your vegetable gardens. And so we use what's on site resources first before you purchase and bring haul in things from other places. Number eight is plant less high maintenance material. So right plant in the right place. So you a lot of things that you create for yard waste are shrub pruning because those shrubs were planted in the wrong spot because they were meant to grow to be five feet wide, but someone decided to plant them between the sidewalk and the garage, like things like that. So a lot of that yard waste comes from those types of things. And so you want to make sure to plant less high maintenance plants that you don't need to be pruning all of the time, less high maintenance plants that you don't need to be cutting back every single year. And so choose plants that fit the space and need less pruning, and the right plant in the right place has less waste for your landscape. And so, number nine is reduce your cleanup culture. Everything that falls to the ground does not need to be cleaned up. It doesn't need to be tidy, it doesn't need to be clean and perfect. We need to think differently about how we are doing these landscape things. And so if you have a landscape that has a lot of beds on it that have native plants in them and helpful plants in them, it makes it much, much easier for those sticks that fall down to be in your landscape and not have to be cleaned up, which then makes your life a lot easier. You're not having to uh cut everything back, you're not having to take and rake up when after a storm every time when little twigs fall down and that kind of thing. They just fall where they are and they are and so you also don't need to be deadheading perennials anymore. So those seed heads are really important for birds, those seed heads are really important for our uh critters that we want to help in our ecosystem, and so make sure not to be deadheading all of those things because that is food, and that is a food cycle, and that helps uh to keep everything going. So we don't need to be cleaning everything up, right? As it becomes a messy problem on things. We can absolutely do this and reduce that cleanup culture that we have. And so the last one is emulate nature. So we talked a little bit about this before. So think about cycles and think about not removing things and think about think about what happens in the forest, think about what happens on the prairie. Every time you touch something in your yard, you need to think about can this just stay here in a better form? It's one question that changes everything that you're doing is that if you have a pile of grass somewhere in your lawn, can you just toss that around a little bit or do you need to remove that from your property? Usually you don't need to remove it from your property, you can use that elsewhere and it saves you time, saves you money, and it saves the world. So let's keep doing that work together on things. And so now there are times when materials should leave the property, and so these are very few times, but we want to make sure to just acknowledge those. And so if you have diseased plants, if you have things that have, you know, heavy, heavy levels of powdery mildew or things like that that you are and that you don't want to have in your yard, absolutely remove those. I'm not saying to never do anything, I'm I'm never a purist on things, so make sure that you are removing those things if you must remove them. So uh if you have invasive weeds, so if you have thistles, make sure to remove those. You don't want to have those on there. If you have other things that are too large to process, big branches, logs, that kind of stuff, volume that's beyond your capacity, it's okay. It's not uh a hundred percent pure on things, it's just a direction that we want to make sure that we are going. So the goal is to make sure that we are nearly eliminating yard waste, but things happen. And so it uh makes sure that you are trying your best with all of these things here at a better yard. So, last thought is uh a modern yard often functions like a factory. Inputs come in, outputs go out, but a better yard functions like an ecosystem. So we recycle resources, nutrients stay on the property, soils improve, and we increase life, we increase habitat, and we do a better job for our neighborhood. So the next time you hear the phrase yard waste, pause for a second, and you don't need those bags on your curb. You don't need all those things. You have the property, then you have the ability to keep those all on your property and to make the world a better place. That is so it's not waste after all, and then maybe it's exactly what your yard needs. So thank you for listening to a better yard podcast. Become a member at member.abetteryard.org, and we would love to have you there with us. You can use the promo code podcast and get the first month for just seven dollars. So it is a really, really great community of people who are working to make the world a better place, one yard at a time. So thank you very much, and we'll see you next week.