Mulching leaves into lawn...?

[Kenneth]

Howdy,

I am considering running my mulching mower over our lawn rather than raking the (modest amount) of leaves off...

[] Good idea... [] Bad idea... [] Other...

Thanks for any thoughts,

[SugarChile]

I do it every year, it works like a charm, and provides some organic material to feed the lawn. The trick is to mow several times over a period of days or weeks as the leaves are falling, so you're not trying to tackle a thick buildup.

Cheers, Sue

[Volfie]

I don't know about the lawn but if you can bag them, dump them in your gardens. Your garden next year will be beautiful.

I don't have a mulching mower but when I see bags of mulched leaves out at the curb on garbage day (duh on those people), I grab them and bring them home. I *love* them.

Giselle (and so did my herb garden)

[zxcvbob]

I mulch most of them into the lawn. If there are a *bunch* of them, I'll go over them rather quickly with the mulching mower, then attach the grasscatcher bag and mow over them again to rechop and bag the excess leaves (which then get dumped in the garden).

Bob

[Doug Kanter]

.....which is exactly what I tried yesterday. Some mowers might handle thick buildup, but mine didn't. Oh well. Someone should design a mower patterned after a cow: More than one stomach (or mulching chamber, as it were).

[Jim Carlock]

"Doug Kanter" sayeth:

LOL Brings back memories...

I ruined a mower when I was kid. The grass grew to one foot high and it was my turn to mow!

The mowers should have bigger engines. That nice 454 cubic inch in the '71 Buick Riviera would have worked great! Or was it a 455? I know it had a Rochester four-barrel carb.

The day I traded the broken lawn mower for the Buick, the Buick ran out of gas as I drove it into the driveway.

Ended up getting a riding lawnmower and I broke the belt on that. Those lawnmowers don't like high grass. If the grass is high, ya just have to go real slowly, an inch at a time. The 5 minute mowing won't work.

[Stephen M. Henning]

I have been doing that for 40 years and wouldn't do it any other way.

The leaves I have are usually dry and "fluffy". If they are two heavy in one area, they get pushed in front of the garden tractor until the load evens out, so they all get mulched eventually. I go over the lawn every week until the leaves stop falling. My leaves are a mixture of oak, ash, Bradford pear, ginko, and assorted leaves that blow in from the surrounding forest.

[Warren]

Depends on how many leaves we're talking about!

In my backyard, that strategy works great. In my front yard, there are so many leaves that even if I ran the mulching mower over and over again, I'd still have a layer so thick it would suppress the grass.

In the front yard I use a leaf vac - a big one that looks like a lawn mower from a distance. The bag holds almost 2 cubic feet of shredded leaves, and I'll get two bag-fulls twice a week from less than 400 sq ft of lawn. No way I could leave that much on the lawn! I dump about half of it on my vegetable garden, toss some manure on it, cover it with a tarp, and till it all in come spring.

But the back and side yards just get mowed with the mulching mower, and it works just fine. And the front yard usually gets the mulching mower treatment once or twice as leaf season finishes. I just have too many of them there to use it as the only way to handle leaves.

[simy1]

I get about one foot of leaves in the frontyard, and a more modest amount in the back. I mow/mulch them all, then as my neighbors pile bags on the curb, I take those for the vegetable garden. So I use all my leaves and bring in about half a ton a year extra. They are really one of the best soil conditioners around, and in spring they disappear completely.

[Mark Herbert]

I do the same. The earthworms love the stuff, and will aerate the soil beneath wherever you deposit it.

I use an electric mower to mulch quite a load of leaves, but if they are dry and I take my time, I can completely powder them in a reasonable time. I always sharpen the blade halfway through the job.

[Bill Spohn]

A decent 6.5 bhp mower like the Ariens will basically deal with anything up to a foot high - just take a pass with the wheels set high before trying to cut it to regular low height. If you try to grind it all in one pass, I imagine you could choke just about anything!

[simy1]

yes. for the lawn, it is certainly a good idea to pulverize them, though I find that even coarsely chopped they disappear by May. for the garden, it is best not to chop them, so that they can suppress weeds well into august the next year. and in fact it is best not to put them on the garden during winter, but rather as far away as possible, because they will attract rodents. it is still a good deal work wise: to move half a ton of leaves twice (once now, once in May) takes two or three hours. to weed the beds twice during the season can take days of work.

[Joe]

I rake my leaves, not much, and the neighbors, big pile, on my beds after they freeze up, which is very soon. Waiting like this gives less habitat to the mice and more constant conditions to the bulbs. By June the leaves have vanished.

For my lawn I rake in black compost right after the thaw. My lawn is nice and green all year this way. (I stopped using chemical lawn amendments three years ago.) In fact there is a sharp green line between me and the neighbor!

[Doug Kanter]

Isn't that fun? I had the same situation with the lawn at my prior house, except I never had enough compost to share between vegetables & grass. But, I didn't bag the grass, and I mowed it as high as the mower could go. My neighbor, on the other hand, was a ChemLawn addict, and mowed his lawn like it was a putting green. Mine looked gorgeous, and his looked like it was close to death, except for 2 weeks in the Spring. He was constantly coming over and asking me what secret stuff I was using. He refused to believe that the answer was "nothing". This went on for 10 years. The dummy never learned.

[Jay Chan]

Exactly, if there is a lot of leaves, mulching alone will still leave a layer of mulch leaves on the grass; they just cannot decompose fast enough -- not good. I will use my mower to "bag" the leaves. My Honda mower will mulch the leaves to small pieces despite the fact that I set it up for bagging not mulching. Then, I dump the whole bag of mulched leaves into my compost pipes. I will mulch agin (instead of bagging) if there is only small amount of leaves or if I am mowing the lawn.

Moreover, using a self-propelled lawn mower is MUCH easier than using a leaves-rack. I would much rather to get my exercises through other means.

I remember my old JD lawn mower cannot cut the leaves into small pieces if I use it in bagging mode. Somehow my Honda can do this in bagging mode. This must have to do with the fact that the Honda lawn mower has 4 cutting blades instead of just two.

I also have a leaf-vac. Unfortunately, it is not a self-propelled version, and pushing (actually is pulling) a leaf-vac over the lawn is not easy. Therefore, I stick with using the self-propelled lawn mower to bag the leaves from the lawn (this also can cut the leaves into small pieces). Now, I only use the leaf-vac on flat surface, such as the drive way and the curb. I might have used the lawn mower to take care of leaves on flat surface in the future; but the leaf-vac "seems" to do a better job in sucking leaves from flat surface, and I can use it to shred fallen tree branches along the way. When the leaf vac dies, I may use the lawn mower to take care of everything.

If you have a self-propelled leaf vac, you will have the best of both worlds.

Jay Chan

[Phisherman]

I have a similar neighbor. He asks how my lawn is so thick, green, and free from weeds. I tell him I mulch mow high and often and overseed in the fall. He continues to scalp his lawn, dumps the clippings into the stream, it's full of crab grass, has bare spots, etc. He bought the same kind of mower I use--still he doesn't have a clue.

[Doug Kanter]

I should add that now that I'm divorced, my teenage son has taken over the mowing chores. The neighbor now interrogates *him* about our deep, dark secret. My son, who inherited my evil mind, has two ideas, both of which I condone completely:

1) Come up with some sort of concoction that's harmless to people, plants and cats, and give the neighbor the recipe. Tell him it's what we use, and that when he used to see me out at night having a cigarette, I was preparing to apply the stuff with a spray bottle. Sample recipe: A strained broth made after boiling broccolli stems, dogwood bark and . Maybe Band-Aids. 2) One part of our lawn consisted of 50% bindweed at certain times of year. Awful weed, but when the grass was suffering in hot weather, the bindweed was rockin', so at least it was soft and green. My son wants to give the neighbor a few diggings of bindweed, and tell him it helps keep nitrogen available to the lawn.

If you've ever inquired at a cooperative extension about getting rid of bindweed, they'll tell you that you need to use chemicals which make agent orange look like herb tea. :-)

[Edward Reid]

When we bought the house we're in now, it had serious drainage problems in the back yard. Any heavy rain would result in a sheet of water sweeping across the yard and down toward the house (yes, it's Florida, but it has some slope nonetheless), with often a large pool between our house and the next door neighbor. Oh, and sometimes it hit the crawl space access door and ran under the house.

Doesn't happen any more.

Oh, at first we built a bit of a berm to divert the flow away from the house. And we had gutters put on the house and piped the water to the ditch, which helped some with the pools.

But mostly what I did was the same as you: nothing. Didn't hire a yard man to come in with his boom-boom tractor mower every week and scalp the yard to within an inch of its life (like the previous owner and probably the one before her). Didn't go woosh woosh with a leaf blower and take away the dead leaves and cut grass and other organic material. Let the weeds grow where the ground had been made bare by mowing where no grass grew anyway. And lo and behold, after a year or so, the rain no longer ran off. Am I not a genius? That or lazy.

Oh, I want to get rid of the grass. I'm trying to kill it. I have too much shade for a good lawn. I'd rather have flower beds and bushes and use some liriope where I need ground cover. But the principle is the same.

Edward

[Stephen M. Henning]

Do you shovel the snow from your grass also?!?! It is the same idea. When the temperatures are cool and the grass is covered by leaves or snow, it goes dormant. By spring the snow and leaves are all gone and the grass is greener than ever. I have been mulching leaves for 40 years and the lawn loves it. By mid winter there is no sign of any leaves. After we have snow, the lawn snaps back greener than ever. For this to work best you need to leave a little length to the grass. Leaving mulched leaves on a putting green doesn't work as well, but cutting grass short like a putting green is the worst thing you can do to normal grass (fescue, rye & bluegrass).

[Stephen M. Henning]

Now this is malicious and is probably actionable in court. In fact it breaks some laws about proliferation of noxious weeds. Since you published this in this thread, you can't plead ignorance and deny malice.

Field bindweed is a declared plant (noxious weed) throughout Western Australia and many other places. It is illegal to grow it and any plants found must be destroyed.

University of Nebraska recommends fall is an excellent time to apply herbicides for control of perennial weeds like Canada thistle, field bindweed and leafy spurge. Oregon State University agrees with this and suggests that application timing be about 1 week prior to the first frost.