Leave Your Leaves
Leaves, Leaves, they’re good for your soil.
The more you leave, the less you’ll toil.
The less you toil, the more you’ll grow.
So, leave your leaves before you sow!
I came up with this little poem/song set to the tune of “Beans, Beans, the musical fruit” and posted it to Bluesky on @SpaceshipEarth, but I like it so much that I felt it needed it’s own blog post.
I’ve heard a lot of people say to leave your leaves in a garden, I have taken that to heart. So much so that I feel the need to actively promote the proactive of leaving the leaves, and I practice what I preach. If you leave your leaves you will create a home for beneficial insects, including fireflies (who doesn’t like fireflies?!), and adds nutrients back to your soil as the leaves decompose – kind of how hugelkultur methods use rotting wood and leaves to build soil for garden beds over time.
If you think about the life cycle of a leaf, then you’ll understand that leaves are both pre-dirt and post dirt. By post-dirt, I mean that trees are a thing that trees manufacture from the nutrients in dirt to achieve their goal of growth through the energy capturing process of photosynthesis.
Environmentalism is Doom and Gloom, but Should be Fun
Unfortunately, most environmental messages are not conveyed in a fun way. I mean, yeah the earth will not be able to sustain human life the way we know it, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be bright rays of hope among the darkness. The vast majority of posts about gardening, permaculture, and climate change are informative and sometimes use scare tactics, but I want to see more memes, more art, and more poetry to convey practical messages about how to help the environment.
There also tend to be hard feelings about leaving leaves in urban and suburban areas, and I think that just goes along with the different mindsets of people depending on their environment, and HOA rules, of course.