Ten Ways to Use Autumn Leaves in the Garden

Leaves falling from your trees might feel like a burden, but in reality, they offer an invaluable garden resource. Here are ten ways to enhance your garden with autumn leaves before the next growing season.

As the weather starts to turn chilly, it’s time to think about fall garden projects. One task to take on is dealing with autumn leaves. If you simply bag them up for disposal, you’re wasting a valuable resource that benefits your garden in multiple ways. Some of these benefits include:

Add nutrients to degraded soil
Improve soil structure
Boost the soil’s microbial life
Increase the soil’s capacity to hold water
Insulate plants from chilly winter temperatures
And so much more!

Just keep in mind that using leaves as-is doesn’t offer much advantage. Instead, the best way to reap the benefits from fallen autumn leaves is to shred them first. This ensures they break down faster, so you aren’t left with a thick mat of half-decayed leaves by spring. Either running over them with a lawnmower or using a leaf vacuum mulcher will do the trick.

Here’s a closer look at ten ways to use autumn leaves this fall to benefit your plants and garden soil.

1. Make a Protective Ground Cover

Fallen leaves make an excellent natural covering that protects perennials from frosts and fluctuating winter temperatures. This strategy particularly works well for protecting herb gardens.

Toss a thick covering of shredded leaves over plants in the fall, and gently rake off what didn’t decompose once the weather warms in the spring. Consider using a broom to spread the leaves overtop fragile plants so they don’t break.

2. Make a Garden Path

It’s possible to use fallen leaves to form new paths through your garden. Lay them down thick where you want to kill vegetation, and the leaves will establish a path as they start to decompose. You can also add a layer of straw or wood chips on top to make the path more pronounced.

3. Improve Your Lawn by Mowing Them In

Fallen leaves offer lots of nutrients for your grass. The easiest way to reap their benefits is to leave them where they land and mow them into place. The bits of chopped leaves will decompose quickly and add valuable nutrients to your grass, which means you’ll need less fertilizer in the spring.

For best results, use a mulching mower with the bag removed. Set the mower height to about three inches (7.5 cm) and make several passes until the leaves are in small chunks.

4. Build a Potato Bin

Put your yard waste to better use by growing food! It’s possible to use shredded autumn leaves to grow lots of potatoes in a small space.

Build a cylindrical wireframe, line it with newspaper, and fill it with a mix of leaves and compost. You can plant your seed potatoes directly within it and pull out the leaves to harvest them when fully mature.

Best of all—you can dump the rotted leaves on your garden beds for a boost of nutrients.

5. Set Up a Worm Bin

Worms love living in fallen leaves. You can use your own supply to make a worm composting bin. Just use them in place of shredded newspaper to work as a comfortable burrowing material.

Provide them with plenty of food scraps and other kinds of organic material, and in time, you’ll have high-quality compost for your garden.

6. Insulate Outdoor Container Plants

If you have plants growing in containers that you don’t want to bring indoors, then autumn leaves can help protect them over the winter. Cluster the pots in a sheltered location and pile leaves as thickly as possible within each pot. Consider using chicken wire as a frame to keep them from blowing away.

7. Make Leaf Mold

When autumn leaves decompose, they turn into a rich, soil-like substance called leaf mold that makes for the perfect plant mulch.

Create your own by piling leaves high in a spot where they won’t blow away (consider making a cage from chicken wire to contain them). Thoroughly wet the leaves so they start to rot, and turn and rewet them a few times over the winter to speed up decomposition.

The resulting chunks of broken-down leaves can be spread over garden beds in the spring.

8. Mulch Your Asparagus Bed

For those growing asparagus, autumn leaves make the perfect fall mulch. Once shredded, you can apply them several inches thick along the base of each frond to protect the roots and slowly release organic material into the soil.

9. Mix Into Your Compost Pile

Dried leaves make for an excellent “brown material” for compost piles. They have a high carbon content that can balance out wetter materials to create better habitat space for beneficial soil microbes. Consider bagging some of your fall leaves to store until the weather warms so you can add them to your compost pile.

You can also add the leaves directly to a compost pile filled with vegetable scraps, grass clippings, and other green materials. Let it all sit over the winter, turning a few times over the weeks, and the pile should be close to fully composted by spring.

10. Form a New Garden Bed

Fall leaves can form the foundation of a new garden bed through a technique known as “lasagna gardening” or “sheet composting.”

The strategy is simple. Pile alternating layers of organic material like leaves, grass clippings, shredded newspaper, kitchen scraps, and even manure on top of grass or just tilled soil. Make sure you use newspaper or cardboard as the base to create a barrier between sunlight and weed seeds so they won’t sprout.

This mixture will slowly break down and nourish the soil while simultaneously suppressing weeds so you have a ready-to-plant space once spring arrives.

Put Your Fall Leaves to Use Today!

For the creative gardener, fall leaves are a stellar resource to improve your soil and get more value from every growing space. Consider following these ten suggestions so you can put this natural material to work!