- Author: Denise Godbout-Avant
People often rake their leaves and put them out to be picked up as trash. I have always preferred to leave the leaves for my garden.
If you take a walk in a forest, you'll see leaf layers several inches deep around trees and bushes. Fallen leaves have a complex relationship with trees and nature, providing many benefits which can be reproduced to some extent in our gardens.
Natural Mulch
Fallen leaves have the same weed suppression and moisture retention properties of shredded wood mulch—and they're free! Where mulch is desired as a decorative element, what could be more seasonally appropriate than a pile of brightly colored fall leaves? This natural mulch also provides insulating winter cover from cold temperatures for roots, seeds, and bulbs.
A Web of Life in Leaf Litter
Leaf litter isn't just free fertilizer and mulch. It provides food and shelter for a wide variety of living things including spiders, snails, worms, beetles, millipedes, mites, toads, frogs and more—these in turn support mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians that rely on these creatures for food.
Detritivores (organisms that eat dead or decaying plants or animals) break up and excrete leaf litter. Fungi and bacteria then take over and complete the recycling process converting these smaller pieces into nutrients which then sustain neighboring plants. They in turn help support biodiversity by becoming food themselves.
Numerous bird species such as robins and towhees forage in the leaf layer searching for insects and other invertebrates to eat.
Raking up leaves and putting them in the trash could have the unintended consequence of removing some of next year's garden butterflies and moths, many of which are pollinators. Most butterflies and moths overwinter in the landscape as an egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, or adult. In all but the warmest climates, they often use leaf litter for winter cover. Fritillaries and wooly bear caterpillars will tuck themselves into a pile of leaves for protection from cold weather and predators. Some Hairstreaks lay their eggs on fallen oak leaves, which become the first food of the caterpillars when they emerge. Swallowtail butterflies disguise their cocoons and chrysalises as dried leaves, blending in with the “real” leaves.
Bumble bees also rely on leaf litter for protection. At the end of summer, mated queen bumble bees burrow an inch or two into the earth to hibernate for winter. An extra thick layer of leaves is welcome protection from the elements.
All of which makes leaf litter an integral part of a complex web of life.
What You Can Do
Composting leaves is a terrific way to recycle and create a nutrient-rich garden soil amendment at the same time. Some gardeners opt for shredding their fall leaves for use in compost piles. Like people who mulch their lawn leaves with a mower, consider leaving some leaves undisturbed in garden beds and lawn edges. If space allows, you could create a leaf pile, allowing it to break down naturally, or add the leaves gradually to your compost pile over time. Such efforts will keep leaf litter critters safe and allow you to benefit from the rich garden gift that falls from the trees above.
While it is ideal to “leave the leaves” permanently—for the benefits mentioned above—if you do decide you need to clean your garden and remove the leaves in spring, try to wait until later in the season, so as to give the critters that have been protected by fallen leaves over the winter time to emerge and depart.
Some gardeners may be concerned that autumn leaves, matted down by rain or snow, could have a negative impact on their perennials. However, a thick layer of leaves provides additional insulation against chilly weather and protects newly planted perennials from frost which could damage tender roots and shoots. Anyone who has spotted fragile spring seedlings popping up in the woods knows that all but the most fragile of plants will erupt through the leaf litter in spring without trouble.
So, leave the leaves. While you can't perfectly emulate a forest, your garden will be healthier and more diversified, you'll help support a vast array of wildlife, and you'll reduce the strain on landfills.
Denise Godbout-Avant has been a UCCE Stanislaus County Master Gardener since July 2020.
Saturday, August 18 is National Honey Bee Day! Many people are concerned about the health of honey bees, and rightly so, as there has been a decline in their populations during the last decade.
This year on National Honey Bee Day, learn how you can protect honey bees by choosing plants for your landscape that bees prefer visiting to collect pollen and by avoiding the use of pesticides that can be toxic to bees.
For specific details about what else you can do, read the article What Can Gardeners do to Help Honey Bees.
Resources
Bee Precaution Pesticide Ratings: this database provides guidance on how to reduce bee poisoning when choosing a pesticide.
Bee-Friendly Plants for California: these seasonal plant lists from the UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab will help you choose plants to attract bees to your landscape year-round.
Protecting Natural Enemies and Pollinators: read this web page to learn how to avoid harming natural enemies and pollinators.
UC IPM has created a diagnostic tool to help easily diagnose pest problems in your garden or landscape.
To get started using the tool, you'll first need to identify the affected plant in your landscape. Then, choose one of the four Plant Types categories that best describes it. To do this, click on the photo directly or use the +Add to my list button.
You will know the choice was made when the main photo is grayed out and your selection is listed in the left-hand column of the screen. To remove a selection, click on the red “X.”
Next, click on the Plant Names bar on the left to view a list of plants in your chosen category. Scroll down through the choices until you find your affected plant, (we'll use broccoli as an example) and then add the plant to your list by clicking on the photo or on “+Add to my list.” Note: you may also view bigger versions of images by clicking on the magnifying glass icon.
Your selection will again become grayed out and will be listed in the left column under Plant Names.
Once you've selected your plant, choose the Plant Parts bar from the left hand menu to view the plant parts choices. In our example, the crown of our broccoli has damage, so we will choose Crown. You can choose more than one plant part, but the more narrow your search, the more precise your results will be.
Once you've selected the plant part(s), click on Damage to see photographs and descriptions of damage that you may be observing on your affected plant. Choose the one that best matches your plant's damage symptoms. Our example plant (a young broccoli transplant) is showing signs of something boring into the crown.
After each selection, you will see a number in the View Results bar. The number of results will get smaller the more you narrow down your choices. Click the View Results bar underneath your selections in the left hand panel to see the diagnosis/es. If you have a handful of choices, you should be able to determine which pest or problem is affecting your plant by inspecting it and comparing the damage to the diagnosis description.
If your search brings up a large number of results, the search was too broad. Narrow down your selections when choosing plant names, plant parts, and damage. This will help you get your results faster and more accurately.
In our broccoli example, there is just one result.
If none of the results seem to match the damage you are seeing, click the “Back to diagnostics” bar and try other damage symptoms. To reset your search and start over, select the Reset All bar. To return to the main UC IPM Home and Landscape page, click on "Home, garden, turf and landscape" in the green bar at the top of the page.
- Author: Trisha Rose
I stroll pretty frequently through our neighborhood with dogs in tow. Many of my neighbors are gifted gardeners and I get a chance to check out and share in their summer bounty. While some of the "suburban farm plots" are shutting down for the season, others are still pumping out the tomatoes and squash. 'Bearss' Lime and 'Improved Meyer' lemon trees are bearing next to a driveway, volunteer squash are flowering by a hose spigot, baby lettuce is keeping company with Kranz aloe and bags of tasty tomatoes and squash appear at my front door along with peppers. Even okra grown from seeds brought in from Northern India is growing very well in the August sun.
Besides all this, one of my neighbors just brought over a dozen fresh eggs naturally colored in shades worthy of an Easter Egg Hunt. This hard working gardener has lots of that great by-product of chicken life she uses throughout her own salad bowl garden and orchard of fruit trees. And she lets a local beekeeper use a back corner for hives which produce lovely honey they both share.
Lots to see here when I put on my walking shoes and start looking around. It's a great way to stay in touch with my neighbors and share in their success as gardeners both literally and visually.
- Author: Edward Walbolt
I am occasionally inclined to take a cutting off of the more unique plants I come across when I am out and about. Recently as I walked on the Linear Park bike trail, I came across some foliage which happened to be on the other side of a private fence in someone’s backyard. I just wanted a cutting, but I found myself asking a question about garden etiquette. Is it socially acceptable to conduct guerilla propagation of someone else’s garden foliage, even if it is only cutting a few nodes of someone else’s Salvia officinalis when no one is looking? Guerilla propagation at first glance seems perfectly fine; I don’t think that I would much mind someone stopping by my yard for a snip here or a cut there as long as the people acted in a respectful manner. My initial suspicions only allowed me more thought about the topic. Not everyone is so outwardly nice, and some people might take exception if they caught an intruder in their garden snipping a branch off their favorite Salix herbacea or Hedera helix. It occurred to me that most guerilla propagators are probably a lot like me and figure that fellow gardeners are nice, and would be flattered that someone would like their selection enough to take and propagate with it. Almost as certain as I am of that, I am also assured in today’s divisive society that the other half of the gardening population would be a little offended, almost intruded upon if their garden was attacked by a stranger with sharp objects. As any credible amateur gardener/scientist would do, I put my theory to the test to see if indeed gardeners are a mirror of regular American society or something different. I asked 10 different gardeners their opinion about guerilla propagation and how it would make them feel if a stranger was taking cuttings of their handiwork. It appears that gardeners are a more generous and giving bunch. Eight out of the ten responses indicated that gardeners feel a sense of pride when other people wanted the fruits of their labor. The scientific moral of this blog is that gardeners are not at all like the general population, we are much kinder, gentler, and more giving. Happy Gardening!
