Description

In this video, professional horticulturist Mitch Baker shows how to utilize fallen leaves.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Mitch Baker with American Plant in Bethesda. We’re talking about winterizing your ornamental garden and right now we’re talking about what to do with all these falling leaves. Now obviously an area like this where we’ve over seeded, we have our grass seed germinating we have to keep these leaves off of this newly developing grass or we’ll have no grass. You can rightly rake over an area like this without disturbing the newly germinated grass seed. You do have to be careful, just lightly rake. You’re going to gather these leaves up. We’re going to put these leaves in the compost pile. I hope you have a compost pile because that’s the best place to put the leaves. Now, you can put them as is or you can chop them up, grind them up, ran your lawn mower over them, reduce them in size. That’s going to make the decomposition faster, easier and more rapid change over to humic matter and that’s what you want to do, just get that humic matter available so you can put it back in the garden. Now, all of these leaves that are falling the beds back here, can we leave those leaves right where they lie in the bed?