Pollinator Confidential
A podcast featuring the untold stories of native plants and the pollinators that love them.
Pollinator Confidential
Leave the Leaves with Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society
Each autumn, homeowners spend huge amounts of time, effort, and sometimes even money to remove fallen leaves from their landscapes. But is this really such a good idea? In this episode, Lisa and Pam are joined by Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society to discuss why “Leave the Leaves” is a better plan, and the best ways to go about implementing it.
Join us for an enlightening conversation that encourages you to embrace the unseen heroes of your garden and redefine what a beautiful landscape truly means.
Hello everyone and welcome to Pollinator Confidential, a podcast featuring the untold stories of native plants and the pollinators who love them.
Pam:I'm Lisa Schneider and I'm Pam Ford, and we are Penn State Extension Master Gardeners from the Schnitznger Butterfly Garden Habitat that's located in Tudyk Park State College, Pennsylvania. We are all about the stories, tales of those fascinating interactions between plants, pollinators and people.
Lisa:Oh, don't you just love this time of year, Pam.
Pam:I love everything about it. I'm a big fan of fall. There's this cool crisp air and there's cozy cardigans, pumpkins and, of course, the stunning colors in the landscape.
Lisa:And we've had our first frosts here in central PA, and I've been cleaning up my vegetable garden, which is important to reduce diseases and pests. I've been pretty busy with that, and so I'm so glad I don't need to do a thing to the rest of my gardens.
Pam:I also wait until spring. And not to give anybody the wrong idea, it's not because we're lazy gardeners. If we remove leaves and plant material too early. We risk destroying many of our pollinators insects that spend the winter tucked away in our garden debris.
Lisa:And to talk more about that. We're so honored to be joined today by Matthew Shepherd
Lisa:from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, where he has worked in pollinator conservation for more than two decades. He currently serves as Director of Outreach and Education and focuses on supporting neighborhood-level efforts such as pollinator gardens and habitat projects in parks kind of like ours, and it's not in the official bio that I read, but since I am a listener, I also know that he's a co-host of a podcast called Bug Banter and he's been a leader in initiatives that you've probably heard of, like what we're talking about today. Leave the Leaves, matthew. Welcome.
Matthew:Thank you so much. I really really appreciate the invitation and I'm just looking forward to this conversation.
Pam:Leave the Leaves is a brilliant slogan. It's very catchy and it's sparked many conversations about the value of leaves. Who originally came up with the Leave the Leaves campaign?
Matthew:Oh, it's interesting. You should ask me that question because it was actually someone from your area, justin Wheeler, who you probably know, yes, we do. Great. Justin worked with us at Xerces for a few years running our website and communications and social media, and he was able to take all his knowledge as a master gardener and having worked at the Snetsinger Butterfly Garden and so on, and he's the person who actually came up with the idea originally and the catchy hashtag.
Pam:Justin is known to come up with very catchy titles for things, so I'm not surprised in the least. We sometimes get questions from homeowners concerned. If we just leave them there where they fall, it'll destroy their lawn, and I interpret the slogan to mean not to necessarily leave them right there, but to understand their value to the habitat.
Lisa:And there are so many ways that fallen leaves are important, why don't we start with leaves as food? We know caterpillars eat those leaves when they're on the tree. But, matthew, can you tell us, give us some examples about who's dining on those leaves once they have fallen and why we care about that?
Matthew:Yeah, sure, I just want to pick up on your point about how the leaves is a really catchy those leaves once they have fallen and why we care about that. Yeah, sure, but I just want to pick up on your point about how lead the leaves is a really catchy hashtag. It's because of that that it's been so successful, because people can really instantly relate to it and it's now well, we're having a conversation about it. So we know that you're promoting it and many other organizations do, but it's not so simple as that, and so that's great that it leads to conversations like like this one, because there's a lot more nuance to it. But, yeah, leaves so important to our environment, incredibly important in nutrient recycling and so on and, as you noted directly, food for some insects who are eating them directly. In. The red banded hair streak is one example of a butterfly whose caterpillars are eating leaves, and not necessarily the one on the tree but the ones on the floor. The adults actually lay eggs on fallen leaves of oak and sumac primarily, and then those fallen leaves form the first meal of of their caterpillars when they hatch out. There are other insects and invertebrates also directly feeding on the leaves. You know, the leaves break down and that's made possible through the what are collectively called detritivores, ie animals eating the detritus and helping with the recycling. So you know, you can think of pill bugs and sow bugs or sow bugs, for example, which are in the leaves and helping, and they're really intriguing because they're actually crustaceans, so they're related to crabs believe it or not and crayfish, and they have gills, so they need that moisture to be able to breathe. So that's why they're living in such a damp area.
Matthew:And you know, there are others that don't necessarily eat the leaves directly but that rely upon them for part of their life cycle. You know, the luna moth is one that we often talk about because its caterpillars are in the tree and then when they come to pupate, they wrap themselves in leaves in the tree and then those leaves fall and so then they complete their, their pupation, their chrysalis stage, and actually emerge from the leaf litter on the ground. And you know we we love luna moths. They're such beautiful, I ethereal, magical creatures to see around. And we know that there are things, such as parasitic flies, that are affecting them. But you also have to wonder whether we're also just sweeping and raking and blowing them away from our landscape because we're just not seeing them when they're in their dormant stage on the ground.
Pam:We like to use the example of the luna moth because so many people are familiar with the insect. It's amazing wingspan and the color. When I look online examples of other pollinators that utilize the leaf litter or I look for an explanation of the luna moth, a lot of times that part of it falling from the tree is not included and it's very helpful. It's over 90%. That's amazing.
Lisa:Yeah, and you're right, when you look up, either online or in reference books about the life cycle of different things, there is this gap, it's like okay, there's eggs and then there's a caterpillar, and then, oh, then they hatch and this butterfly or moth emerges, and they don't tell you about it. Yeah, that's very interesting and that's a point that's often lost.
Matthew:When people are thinking about a butterfly garden or a pollinator garden, they're thinking about flowers, but not how do you support the entire life cycle?
Pam:And that's where leaves and stems and all the other elements of your yard come in and in our area there's several butterflies that spend the winter in the leaves or in other shelter as an adult the mourning cloak, for example and then there's bumblebees.
Matthew:If you want to move beyond butterflies and moths, you know the bumblebee queens are another one that we don't think about where they go in the winter, but the queens individually they will actually bury themselves into the top layer of the soil or underneath the leaf litter, somewhere where they can be sheltered and protected from the cold weather, and then they remain dormant and hibernation, basically to emerge late winter, early spring the following year right.
Lisa:When we talk to kids I always say you know when you, when you remove the leaves in the fall. It's pretty much like if somebody came into your house at the beginning of fall and stole all your blankets.
Pam:And we have a wonderful photograph that we show of a new queen finding shelter under the leaves, and it's you know. A picture is worth a thousand words when you're trying to explain to someone what happens to these bees in the winter. And something that we talk about all the time is think about the entire life cycle, not just the adult, and if you think of insects in that way, you will cover all the bases well, and also and also the whole food web, right Like.
Lisa:One example that people are interested in hearing about is fireflies and the fact that you know if you want fireflies in your yard, you need to stop blowing all the leaves away, because can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Matthew:Sure I'd be happy to. Fireflies are such a magical insect. It happens where I live in Oregon, on the West Coast. We have fireflies but they don't light up. At night we have what are referred to as daytime dark fireflies and they look just the same, they have the same type of beetle, they have the red markings and so on, and I find them around, but they just don't light up, which is really sad.
Pam:That is very sad.
Matthew:I've had the good fortune to visit friends and relatives in the Midwest and when I'm there it's like they have to get used to it. It's like this weird Brit who will go around and sit on the sidewalk at night or crawl around because you want to get close. But yeah, and again we see the adult. It's the adult, that is the life stage that is flashing and it's doing that to attract a mate, or sometimes, I think, really fun. There are some species that mimic the flash patterns of another to attract the male down. So the female of the other species is going to have a dinner. So I mean, it's not all happiness. But in order for us to be able to enjoy that phase of the firefly's life, we need to be able to ensure, as we're saying, how do you support the entire life cycle and the?
Matthew:The larvae of fireflies look completely different from from the adult of most species and are these small some people have kind of referred almost like a crocodile or a miniature alligator in a way. They have these lengthy, segmented bodies that are heavily armored and they're crawling around through leaf litter, through the top layers of the soil, through vegetation, looking for, often slugs and snails to eat. So this is where they're munching, and they could spend a couple of years as a larvae doing that, and then you know they also need somewhere to pupate. Some species do it as individually, some do it as groups, but they normally most of them are doing that in a small cavity in the top layer of soil, for example, or underneath the leaf litter. So there's two stages of the fireflies life cycle, which they need leaf litter, they need damp places.
Matthew:Fireflies live in all sorts of different places, but one thing that is consistent is moisture. Sometimes that means a wetland, sometimes that means a pond edge, sometimes that's a creek. But we can have that moisture as well by retaining denser, longer vegetation and, in particular, leaf litter in our gardens. And so if we're going to spend those wonderful evenings watching them, so many people have memories, particularly from childhood, of that, and now they're saying, oh, but I don't see them, like I used to.
Lisa:Right, guess why.
Matthew:And again we're cleaning up our landscapes and I know when we think of habitat loss we may instantly imagine bulldozers and chainsaws and we think of those big kind of visceral changes that we see in the landscape. But when it comes to insects you know a rake, a leaf blower that that urge for tidiness and neatness and a manicured landscape is leading to the loss of so much habitat and with that so much of the, the insect and the invertebrate life that we rely on.
Lisa:Exactly so, folks. If you like fireflies, quit raking, put that rake down. Redefining beauty.
Lisa:That's right. So the use of leaves obviously they're very important to all the insects and all the food web. But what about for us? You know, as you mentioned, we are sort of obsessed with having a neat and tidy landscape, and so many people spend a ton of time and money and even fuel on removing every stray leaf from their landscape and then they use even more time and money to dump huge loads of hardwood mulch right around where those leaves should be. You know, Matthew, when you think about it it's kind of nuts, I mean, because leaves really are the best mulch for so many reasons, right?
Pam:The best fertilizer, the best nutrients?
Matthew:Yeah, totally. I mean, if you look at a natural broadleaf forest, for example, anything between about two-thirds of a ton and more than two tons of leaf litter will fall in an acre of forest and that's a profoundly important part of the nutrient cycle within that forest that keeps that forest healthy. And so, yeah, that same value for, you know, the fertilizer, the nutrients that our plants need to grow, that the fiber, the organic matter that helps build healthy soils. But even these days, carbon sequ sequestration you know, at what point did we start thinking about our gardens as a way to change, you know, save the climate? It's like some of these things just are a bit mind-boggling, but all of these things can be beneficial, can benefit from keeping leaves, and so you know plants as well. You can take it beyond. I mean, how many of the problems with plants that people are turning to fungicides and pesticides and whatever else, you know, because their plants are not healthy and because their soils are not healthy. So leaf litter definitely helps build healthy soils that are so important to the plants we grow, and much, much more. One thing about Leave the Leaves, as we mentioned earlier, it's this nice, easy, catchy hashtag, but how you manage them in your garden is more nuanced. I mean, one of the things to remember is that it's a garden, so you're going to have a place where you want your kids to run around, your dog to chase a ball, or you're going to want somewhere where you can sit with friends or drink your morning coffee, you know, and all these other things that we want to get from our gardens, and so we're going to. We're going to have areas of our garden which are dedicated to different things, and so you just, you know, in the same way that you might say, oh well, that's my patio, that's my sitting area, you can say, well, that's my leaf area, you know.
Matthew:So you don't have to keep them everywhere where they fall, but there should be somewhere in your garden where you can keep some leaves. You know, I rake them onto my flower board, as keeps the weeds down. It provides habitat for all sorts of things. You can, you know you could break them up. Put them in the back corner of your yard, have a heap by a fence, put them down the base of a hedgerow, keep them around. You know, if you have an area with trees, you know, take them off your lawn and keep them under the area with the trees. So there are lots of different places where you could consider keeping leaves in your garden, and it's not an all or nothing thing.
Matthew:You don't have to necessarily keep them all. I mean, there's always going to be more leaves than you can handle, so that's fine, but don't get rid of them all and also don't create a problem for yourself. You're going to have some areas where you don't create a problem for yourself, you know. You're going to have some areas where you don't want them, blocking drains, you don't want them, creating a slip hazard, you know, so you're going to manage them.
Matthew:There's also the it's like the downside of all that insect life and invertebrate life is you're going to get a few in there that you may not necessarily want, and I know one that concerns people is ticks, you know. But if you're managing your, your landscape for ticks, that means that you're already taking steps to create, you know, what you might call safe spaces, places where people will be or your pets might be, um, so that you're not brushing past taller vegetation where you may have questing ticks looking for a meal and such like, and so you can maintain all of those same safeguards. But you know, in those areas where you're not active. That's where you might consider keeping your leaves.
Pam:Those are all great points, and something I want to add is for those homeowners that are concerned when the leaves fall and they cover their plantings, how will the plantings come up through the leaves? And I tell them, I live in a forested area where the plants have no trouble coming up through the leaves.
Pam:It happens every year. The leaves fall and the plants come up right through it. Very healthy plants, very healthy soil, and that sort of helps them understand that they're safe. There's a lot of air passing between the leaves and moisture retained, so all those examples you gave are great. Is there anything our listeners should know about best practices for our landscapes that support pollinators at this time of year?
Matthew:One thing I love about gardening, and particularly kind of wildlife pollinator gardening, is that you often think of conservation as being something you have to do more of. You know you have to go out, you have to plant something, you have to clear something. You know there's more. But one of the great things about like, leave the leaves, and this time of year you can actually bring such benefit and create habitat by doing less. So we've talked about leaves. You know less raking and so on. That's one thing.
Matthew:But also, when you look at your plant borders, your flowers, you can also look at the stems. Stems and again, it's like this traditional view of gardening at this time of year is that you need to clean up and tidy up your garden and chop everything down and clear it away and, you know, get it ready for winter, when in fact, a great way of getting ready for winter is actually to do very little. Um, you know you can leave your plant stem standing. If you've had those golden rods and the cone flowers and all those other summer blooms that have had all those butterflies and bees and pollen, they're going to have lots of seed on them, so leave the seed heads.
Pam:Oh, so the next slogan should be leave it be.
Lisa:Leave it Bee!
Matthew:the Stems.
Pam:Oh, there you go, got to get that alliteration going.
Matthew:But again, because the stems have such benefits, you know, you feed the birds over the winter, they provide shelter through the cold months for various animals and insects, but then in the spring, when, when it's coming around, you come, you do then start cleaning up and tidying and you cut or you just break off those stems and have them eight, eighteen, twenty four inches long, and there are a lot of bees that will nest right down those stems. Something like 30 percent of our native bees are tunnel nesting and a lot of those benefit from hollow stems or soft-scented pithy stems. Small carpenter bees, for example, will chew out the middle of those stems. There are many other bees that will nest down hollow stems and so we're creating nest sites, supporting the whole lifestyle, the whole life cycle of bees by leaving their stems.
Pam:That's a practice we use at the Snetsinger Butterfly Garden. Yeah, and we don't go out there till mid-April. And we tell people approximately tax day is a way to remember. Approximately tax day is a way to remember, but, like you said before, it's very nuanced. We're paying attention to the temperatures and really looking at the habitat and the plants as they're emerging.
Matthew:So it's not as easy as just picking a date. No, no, it's not. But if you're a gardener you know that nothing's easy, right.
Lisa:So, before we do our wrap-up, is there anything else that we have not asked you about that you would like to make sure to highlight?
Matthew:I don't think so. I mean we've talked through leaves and stems and doing less to get more, you know, and supporting the life cycle. So you know that's great. The other thing to do at this time of year is to rest and relax, and it's a good time of year, you know. We're coming in and we're getting excited. The seed catalogs are going to turn up soon, right, and so take a look at your garden. See what there is out there, you know. Take stock. Are there places where plants haven't done so well and you can introduce new species that are adapted to your local area? Are they? Did you have periods of your summer where maybe you didn't have enough bloom and other species you can introduce? So this is a great time if you have to kind of take stock of your garden. Plan ahead for next year. Dream about all those new blooms and the bees you're going to see next summer when it's warm again right?
Lisa:yeah, it's the best time of year, right? So really, we can all just relax and let nature do its thing and enjoy this very special beauty of this wonderful time of year. Matthew, thanks so much for chatting with us today. We really appreciate your time and listeners. With all that free time you have now that you don't have to spend all your weekends hauling leaves away, why not head on over to xerces. org and check out the many, many wonderful resources that are available for you there? And since, since you're a podcast listener, don't forget to tune in to Bug Banter with Matthew and his co-host.
Pam:And, as always, visit our website, which is brand new, snetsingerbutterflygarden. org It has so many resources of special interest to Pennsylvania and Mid-Atlantic residents. We have new directories of plants, pollinators and birds, and there is also a valuable guide on how to plant for pollinators. While you're there, join our mailing list and find out the latest news and events happening at the SBG.
Lisa:So get out there and enjoy this beautiful fall weather and join us next time for more Pollinator Confidential.