It’s fine to do routine maintenance or minor organizing that can make your outdoor space look a bit neater. But to best conserve the natural habitat around your home and prepare your yard for a healthy bloom season, don’t do any intense cleaning, raking, or pruning until the weather starts to turn warmer. This allows your yard to reap the natural benefits of the changing seasons.
As we begin to transition into colder temperatures and areas of the state reach peak foliage, it’s important to know how to get your yard ready for winter. Now that you’ve learned more about why lawns are so important in fall, here are a few ecological tips to incorporate into your fall cleanup checklist:
Remove Leaf Litter Slowly Over Time
As with most things in nature, a gradual and gentle change will have much less of an impact on the environment than a swift, drastic one. Removing leaves and other debris is not always a bad thing and is often deemed necessary to continue to enjoy your yard into the colder months.
Sometimes, excessive leaf cover can even be damaging to your plants from crushing and smothering them. If you need to remove some or all of the leaf litter in your yard, the most ecologically friendly method is to do it slowly over a period of weeks or months. Using gentler methods like rakes instead of powerful leaf blowers also can reduce the disturbance of the soil and microorganisms underneath.
Leave some leaves behind
While removing every last fallen leaf from your yard may help you forget winter is coming in the short term, it may have some negative effects on your grass and the wildlife that call your yard home. Leaving some leaves behind through the fall and winter will allow all of the natural processes surrounding leaf litter to take place. You can then remove what’s left in the spring with much less environmental impact.
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