3 Ways to Work With Fall Leaves to Cultivate Abundance

Do you love watching the trees turn colors in the fall, but dread the chore of raking up all those leaves and figuring out what to do with them? Instead of getting rid of them, here are 3 excellent ways you can keep them on your property and use fall leaves to cultivate abundance.

Fall Leaves as a Resource

Driving around my community in the fall, it seems that most people just view fall leaves as a waste and a chore.

Sure, kids may have fun jumping into a pile but otherwise the fallen leaves are just plain annoying.

You got to rake them, and bag them, and dispose of them...

But fall leaves can be a great resource for your property or garden.

Instead of an annoying chore, fall leaves can help you build soil, retain water, and work with nature. Fall leaves are so valuable that I collect over 100 bags of fall leaves from my neighbors for my property and garden!

In addition to these 3 methods, I have one more—focused on how fall leaves can help your lawn—as a bonus for you at the end of this post.

I have also created a simple, easy-to-print cheat sheet for you to help you turn mucky brown leaves into gold to help you cultivate abundance.

1. Create Leaf Mold for Your Garden

So, leaf mold is a bad name for something that can really help your garden and other plants thrive.

I mean does anyone ever say, “Give me some mold!”

So, what is leaf mold?

Leaf mold is essentially fall leaves that have decomposed over the course of 1 to 3 years, depending on your climate and how fine you want the leaves to breakdown.

In many ways you can think of leaf mold as compost that only uses fall leaves with nothing else added to it.

Perhaps we should just call it “leaf compost”.

Leaf mold is different than the compost you are likely familiar with for a few key reasons.

Unlike regular compost, leaf mold is driven by fungi instead of bacteria. This makes it slower, but you also don’t need to turn it or worry about reaching a proper temperature.

Leaf mold won’t heat up at all like regular compost.

And finally, unlike regular compost, leaf mold is poor in nutrients.

Yup, I said it. And that right there is a reason people may be reluctant to add it to their garden.

But here’s the thing.

Though poor in nutrients, it still provides some amazing benefits to your garden. For one thing, it creates an environment where earth worms and other beneficial soil life thrive.

Those critters bring the nutrients (Think worm castings that you can buy for your garden - you can get it for free).

So, leaf mold will still leave your soil more nutrient-rich than it started out.

How to Make Leaf Mold

Use Fall Leaves as Mulch Around Your Plants

Placing fall leaves around your plants provides most of the same benefits as leaf mold. But you will need to be okay with having fall leaves around your plants.

Personally, I don’t have an issue with this, but I know some people don’t like the aesthetics of it. But the way I see it, the benefits are just so great that it seems like a no-brainier to me.

Of course, if you don’t want to put fall leaves around your plants, you can just use leaf mold instead.

To use fall leaves as mulch, just place them around your plants about 4 to 6 inches thick.

The leaves will compress a bit overtime.

If your soil has a good amount of soil life, the leaves will breakdown by the following summer. If you don’t have good soil life, they may stick around a while longer.

But adding leaves will help bring your soil to life.

So if you keep adding leaves every fall, it won’t be long before your soil will be so full of life that it will quickly break down the leaves, providing nutrients and other benefits to your plants.

Should You Shred the Leaves?

Use Fall Leaves to Prepare Areas for Future Planting

This is very similar to using fall leaves as mulch, but instead of putting the leaves around your existing plants, this method gets an area ready for future planting.

Say you have a grassy area that you want to turn into a garden or plant fruit trees. How would you go about getting that area ready?

There are several options, but if you have a lot of fall leaves then you can use them to help you.

First, you will want to add a layer of cardboard, newspaper, or burlap bags down on top of the grass.

Then add the fall leaves on top of the first layer. The leaves should be at least 6 inches thick, and I like to go even thicker if I have enough leaves.

This method is called sheet mulching, and Gaia’s Garden has a great overview of how this works.

Over time, the cardboard, newspaper, or burlap bags will breakdown—but not before the grass underneath it has been killed and decomposed. The leaves will also slowly break down.

The result?

An area that was just unproductive grass has been turned into a fantastic bed of soil for next spring’s garden.

I have used this method to transform an old degraded grass and gravel parking area into a food forest (an orchard or garden that mimics the structure of a forest).

The soil went from being so hard that I could not dig into it, to being soft enough for me to plant fruit trees.

Bonus: Using Fall Leaves on Your Lawn

These 3 methods may all be great, but I bet your still planning on raking them up from your lawn. If you want to use the leaves to create leaf mold or mulch, then awesome!

But, if you are still just bagging the leaves up and hauling them away, there is a much easier option.

Leaves that fall on your lawn can just be left where they are and then mowed instead of being raked. If you use a mulching lawnmower the leaves will be chopped up finely enough that you will barely notice them.

By doing this, you will be improving your lawn over time instead of spending time and energy removing the leaves that could benefit your lawn.

Use Fall Leaves Around Your Property or in Your Garden

Fall leaves are an amazing resource that comes to your property free of charge every year. This post covered 3 ways you can work with fall leaves on your property to cultivate abundance.

Don’t throw away this amazing resource that can provide so much benefit to your property and help you cultivate abundance.

I go out of my way to collect bags of leaves from my neighbors, and while I love getting the leaves from them, I wish they would all start using the leaves on their own properties.

So, how do you use fall leaves? Do you have any other methods that you would like to share? Please leave a comment below sharing how you plan to use fall leaves.