How many reasons do you need to leave some leaves in your landscape?
As fall approaches, the leaf blowers have already started up in our neighborhood. I could write about these noisy, polluting machines. I could also tell you how important leaves are in the garden as a natural mulch and how they contribute to the organic matter in the soil. I’ll save those topics for another day. It’s what leaf blowers are designed to do that troubles me.
Remember the Three Little Pigs story? The big bad wolf says “I’ll huff and I’ll puff till I blow your house down”.
Leaves provide habitat for so many organisms during the different stages of their lifecycles. Without a good layer of leaf litter left on the ground, we are severing so many of the connections in the food and plant web in our ecosystems. Leaves provide much-needed protection from cold temperatures during the winter months, as well as the fluctuating freeze-thaw cycles.
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