6 Creative Ways to Keep Fall Leaves Out of the Landfill and Use Them in Your Denver Garden
It’s always a bit heartbreaking to see bags of leaves sitting out for garbage collection when they could be doing so much good for your garden! Before you send your leaves to the curb, check out these six ways to put them to work and benefit your garden this fall and winter.
In this blog, you’ll learn:
How to Use Leaves in Your Garden
How Leaves Can Benefit Your Pollinators
Distributing Leaves Sustainably
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1. Create a Leaf Compost Pile:
Geobin Composter in Denver
Store your leaves in a geobin or a simple chicken wire circle to have a secure place for brown compost materials. This method works throughout the winter and ensures you’ll have leaves to balance out all the green material you’ll add in spring and summer.
Want to speed up the process? Give the leaves time to break down in the bin, and by spring, you’ll have rich, fluffy leaf compost ready to feed your garden beds!
2. Mulch Your Garden Beds:
Don’t let your beds go bare this winter. Cover them with a thick layer of leaves to insulate the soil, suppress weed growth, and create a compost layer that will break down right in the garden. This leaf mulch keeps your soil warm and protected throughout the cold season and prepares it for a healthier start in spring.
3. Help the Pollinators:
A thin layer of leaves left on your lawn provides pollinating insects, such as bumblebees, with a cozy winter shelter. You can also chop the leaves with a mower to make smaller pieces, which will decompose faster and give your soil a nutrient boost.
4. Layer Your Landscape Beds:
Before adding mulch to your landscape beds next spring, move a layer of leaves to those areas now. They’ll decompose over winter, providing a free, nutrient-rich compost layer for your plants to enjoy.
Fall Leaves in Denver, Colorado
5. Share the Wealth:
Got too many leaves to use? Share the love by offering bagged leaves to your neighbors on Nextdoor or Facebook. Plenty of gardeners out there will gladly take them off your hands for their compost or mulch needs.
6. Utilize Denver’s Free Leaf Drop:
For those of you in Denver, the city offers a FREE leaf drop at the City & County of Denver Recycling Center on Cherry Creek South Dr. between specific dates every fall. Instead of letting those leaves go to waste, drop them off for composting and contribute to the city’s green efforts.
Your fall leaves are a free resource for nourishing your garden, helping pollinators, and reducing waste. So before you send those leaves to the landfill, try one of these creative methods to put them to good use.
What do you plan to do with your fall leaves this year? Share your tips or photos of your leaf-filled garden beds with us! Let’s keep the garden growing, even through winter.
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Meet the Gardener
I’m Elisa Mack - a mom and Denverite who went from being a green-ish thumb to a kitchen garden fanatic simply by dedicating myself to the study of all things Colorado gardening.
Landscapers don’t design. And nurseries don’t make house calls.
We take a more full-service approach, from designing your dream garden to keeping it beautiful year-round.
And as your coach, I’ll help eliminate the guesswork through every season, no matter your level of knowledge.
