Fall leaves clean up

In fall season, most of our local deciduous trees and shrubs such as Dog wood, Magnolia, Maple, Oak and Willow cane drop massive number of leaves epically during the raining season in Greater Vancouver area. For most residential homes and strata properties owners, the most difficult time to keep the yard clean is during this season. Most of the deciduous plants don’t drop their leaves in a same week, for properties that have multiple species of plants can take up to month for all the leaves to naturally drop. We get many questions about what to do about those leaves, especially during quotation presentation, so let’s talk about what you can do with fall leaves.

Blow all the leaves to cover the garden beds.

Leaves can be considered as natural nutrients and mulch. Mostly for commercial and strata property, lawn mower can efficiently collect and grind the leaves to it recycle bag. Then lay the leaf mulch on the garden bed nicely and waiting for the leaves decomposing to nutrition. Many heats will be release during the process of decomposing that means the temperature on soil surface won’t drop too low during winter. This method might not apply for gardens that has too many obvious diseased plants, for those gardens’ leaves should be collected and put into recycle bins to prevent transfer of diseases.

Collect regularly and put away

For smaller garden, leaves can be collected and put into recycle bags. This is the cleanest way to make sure fall leaves are all cleaned out. However, once the garden has been cleaned, organic matter and synthetic fertilizer need to be considered for adding nutrition back to the garden. This method applies usually for gardens that have mostly covered by paving stones or concrete that minimum garden bed cannot take many fall leaves. It also mostly used for gardens that have annual mulching services, that landscaping company regularly add mulch through out the seasons, so the garden can have very clean look and don`t need to create extra mulch for winter.