Does your yard collect tons of leaves during the fall? Did you know you could collect Mother Nature’s seasonal gift and turn it into a useful landscaping item? How? Turn it into mulch! Fallen leaves make the perfect natural mulch, and they’ll help improve the look of your landscaping come spring! Why pay for mulch when you can easily make your own?
Benefits of Leaf Mulch
Leaf mulch and wood mulch provide many of the same benefits, but generating your own mulch allows you to save money and reduce your carbon footprint. Leaf mulch provides a variety of other benefits:
- It protects your soil from eroding
- Helps retain soil moisture for your garden beds and landscaping
- It provides a habitat for beneficial microorganisms
- The fallen leaves contain essential plant nutrients
- Leaves are available to you right from your backyard
- It reduces the amount of weeding needed
If you are unable to gather enough leaves to cover the needed area(s), you can ask neighbors if you can use their leaves. Most people will appreciate that they don’t have to take care of the leaves themselves. You can also mix your leaf mulch with other mulches, saving you money in the future! Look below at the leaf mulch Longwood Gardens was able to generate for their many gardens.
Some areas offer leaf processing services. If you don’t have anywhere to store leaves for the winter, you can still benefit from local services! For shredding or chopping the leaves, you can use a lawnmower or use a shredding machine. At MacKissic, we have many options that make this task easier for commercial and residential properties.
How Do You Make Leaf Mulch?
Once you’ve gathered all the leaves you’d like to save for mulch, you will need to shred them. Shredding should be done prior to winter for best results. Once your leaf pile is shredded, ideally you should have somewhere to keep it for the winter. Throughout winter the pile will decompose and reduce in size. It is important to shift the leaves around about once a month to help the leaves break down further, making it nutrient-dense for your soil in spring!
Joe Gardener shared this helpful image to show the difference in freshly shredded leaves (left side), compared to leaves that were sitting since last fall (right side). The right side mulch is rich and nutrient-dense, perfect for landscaping or gardening.
Some areas offer leaf processing services. If you don’t have anywhere to store leaves for the winter, you can still benefit from local services. For shredding or chopping the leaves, you can use a lawnmower or use a shredding machine. At MacKissic, we have many options that make this task easier for commercial and residential properties.
MacKissic’s Leaf Cycler
First, we have our leaf cycler. Starting off strong, the Mighty Mac Leaf Cycler chips, shreds, blows, vacuums, and bags all kinds of yard debris, making it the ultimate four-in-one machine. This tool will reduce the amount of time spent collecting leaves!
The vacuum-bagger and mulcher work together with the vacuum sucking up the material. The mulcher processes the material straight into a nylon mesh bag. Once the material has been shredded, it can be used as mulch, compost, or be reprocessed for an even greater reduction in debris. Not only can you shred your leaves down, you can also add in small branches and other brush materials.
Mighty Mac Vacuum
If you’re looking for a vacuum to quickly clean up your property, our Mighty Mac Vacuum is the machine for you. Yards, driveways, sidewalks, and other large areas are no obstacle for our push or self-propelled walk-behind vacuum machines.
Our optional eight-foot vacuum hose kit is a great accessory for getting to hard-to-reach areas such as between bushes, landscaped areas, or any other tight spots that require cleaning. The Mighty Mac Vacuum also has chipping capacities!
We offer many commercial and homeowner products that have different benefits depending on what you’re looking for. If you have more than leaves and small branches to shred, one of our Mighty Mac Shredder-Chippers may be best! If you have a large property that would take hours to collect all of the leaves, our Mighty Mac Leaf Blower will resolve that issue!
Making your own mulch at home is a rewarding, money-saving task. Leaf mulch will provide your gardens and landscaping areas with nutrient-dense mulch. Once you’ve completed the leaf collection and shredding, you can let it sit for the rest of the season while the leaves break down. Happy mulching!
