Chopping leaves beats raking them up

When you have as many trees as we do, raking leaves is simply out of the question.

While some country folks just let the wind blow the leaves away, I find that they don’t all blow away, especially if they get wet.

So to clear them up, I take my mower over the piles of leaves a few times to chop them into tiny pieces.

I first heard about this alternative to raking from a study by turf researchers at Michigan State University. The MSU turf folks experimented with mowing about six inches of tree leaves into lawns, and checked the results in subsequent years. The leaves included maple and oak, and the finding was: no adverse effect whatsoever on lawn grass.

The researchers recommend making a couple of passes with your mower so that the leaves are chopped into small pieces. You’ll see the chopped leaves after you’ve mowed, and a week or two later those little pieces sift down into the lawn.

When I mowed over the leaves last fall, I hardly noticed any residue in the spring, and the few dried leaves that there were got chopped up when the lawn was mowed.

Fewer dandelions

Now, there’s even better news about this technique: MSU researchers have found that lawns getting the chopped leaf treatment actually had fewer dandelions after a few years.

I haven’t read the study, (I only know about it from this MSU newsletter), and I don’t know what the mechanism is, but in the dandelion department, those of us in Ontario need all the help we can get.

Tagged as: dandelions, fall leaves, Lawn, mowing