Jeff Lowenfels via Anchorage Daily News:

Dead leaves are good. Leave them where they fall.

For years I’ve been advising readers not to rake leaves. This advice initially was a result of my traveling to Asia one fall and discovering upon my return that all the leaves I didn’t rake that year disappeared over the winter.

Leaves disappear when there is snow cover because more decay occurs in the space between the ground and the leaves during the winter than during the summer.

This is so because of active microbes in this space, which retain some of the ground’s heat. Even if there is no snow, leaves blow around until they get caught by fences and outbuildings on your property or blow over to you neighbors’ yards.

For the few of you who do not believe this advice, you no longer need to believe me. Last week there was an article in the venerable Times of London suggesting that British homeowners should not rake leaves. It pointed out that worms will flip leaves and pull them into their underground burrows, which also happens here when the ground thaws.

It also noted that hedgehogs need these leaves for the winter — which is not a usable benefit here! — and that yards need these leaves to support insects, which is definitely true here. We need those insects because they and especially their larvae are part of the soil food web, as well as to support our bird population.

As noted in previous columns, these leaves support the soil food web, which returns the nutrients in them back to the trees that produced them. This is Nature’s Law of Return: “What falls from a plant should be left alone to feed the plant.” If you leave them, you have a closed loop and will never have to fertilize your plants.

Of course, not everyone understands that you can’t smother a healthy lawn with leaves. It just doesn’t work that way. I am not sure how the myth of raking came about, but we need to forget about it. It just isn’t true.

You can never have too many leaves, in my book. You can use them to feed the lawn and in compost piles. Of course, you can also use them as mulch during summer but also the fall, so that they will decay and put nutrients back into the soil all winter long, making the garden ready for the spring and summer plantings.

The latter reasoning is why you should drive around the neighborhood, locate yards that don’t show signs of dogs, and take the bags homeowners place on the curb destined for our landfills, which is so silly and ultimately expensive as we have to make new ones when the old ones fill up.

If you don’t like the look of a yard full of leaves, you can run them over with a mower and set a pattern with them. This will add interest to your winter yard when there is no snow cover. It will also increase their rate of decay, again returning the nutrients they contain to the yard.

Leaves are good, and you can leave them where they fall.

Find Jeff on X at https://twitter.com/gardenerjeff