It’s fall, and the leaves are flying. If you’re tired of gutter cleaning and raking, you may be less than enchanted by this proliferation of leaves. However, they can be a boon to your garden and your home landscape. How can you use this abundance of leaves?

1. Use Leaves As Landscaping Decorations

Leaves may be numerous, but they can also be beautiful. If you have beautiful leaves, use them as decorative items. Scatter some among the pumpkins on your porch, or use them to stuff a scarecrow or a bag that looks like a Halloween pumpkin.

2. Create Children’s Crafts

Those with particularly good-looking leaves can turn them into crafts with children or grandchildren. What can you do with a leaf?

• Create outdoor nature art by arranging leaves in patterns
• Put a leaf on a piece of paper a paint around it
• Dry a leaf and paint patterns on it
• Paint the leaf and press it onto paper to make leaf prints
• Create a bouquet of the most beautiful leaves
• Make a leaf crown
• Put a leaf under a piece of paper and make a rubbing
• Add eyes and noses to leaves to turn them into leaf animals

3. Donate Them to a Child Care

You may have a lot of luscious leaves, but not everyone is so lucky. Is there a child care nearby that is in need of leaves for their children to play in this fall? Some child cares are in urban areas and don’t have as many trees available where the children can play. Donate your leaves to the local kids so that they can build leaf piles and create leaf crafts as well.

4. Turn Them Into Fertilizer

Do your vegetable gardens need a boost? Stack up your leaves in a bag or a pile or add them to an existing compost bin. By springtime, you’ll have a lovely lot of leaves that’s starting to get quite rotten. Make sure that the pile is relatively damp to accelerate the process of decomposition.

5. Mow Your Leaves

Sigh. You have leaves all over your lawn. Didn’t you just rake them up yesterday? Instead of being unhappy, embrace this lawn fertilizer. Use a mulching mower to shred your leaves where they sit and turn them into smaller pieces that will easily decompose. These leaf pieces will nourish your lawn, and the mulching mower makes them less visible. Make sure that you have enough mulch, but not too much. If you have a lot of leaves, this is a good choice at the end of the leafy season when you have no more than 3/4 of an inch of leaves on top of your lawn.

6. Keep Them in the Garden Beds

Leaves naturally decompose and turn into soil. They can do this in your garden too, if you let them. Rake your leaves into a pile and move them into areas that need more soil or a protective layer for the winter. Whether it’s snowy or rainy, leaves provide a blanket for your plants that also happens to be exceptional at delivering more nutrients to your garden. As they degrade, they also make your soil structure more complex, making it easier for air and water to move into your soil. Forget about buying a bag of compost: if you have leaves falling from your trees, use those instead.

At Harry Helmet, we know about leaves. In fact, we’re been working for years to develop products that will reduce your gutter cleaning in the fall. That way, you can enjoy your time jumping in the leaves and spend less time cleaning your gutters. Contact us today to learn more about Gutter Helmet.

Written by Del Thebaud