october 2020
When preparing your lawn for winter, you should keep the lawn leaf free. Going into winter, excessive leaf matter can:
- Smother the grass, causing it to thin out
- Insulate the grass so it doesn’t have the chance to acclimatize to the winter
- Promote snow mold diseases
- Block sunlight and trap excess moisture against the lawn, resulting in bare patches come spring
- Allow turf damage to be more extensive in the spring from critters (voles, mice).
Ideally, you could remove the leaves and add them to your compost pile for future garden use. If you don’t have a compost pile, this would be a great time to start one because decaying organic matter is beneficial to your gardens and flower beds.
Mulching leaves with a mower and letting them remain on the lawn to absorb the nutrients is another option; however, you must grind the leaves up into fine particles to avoid turf suffocation.
Be sure not to mow too thick of a leaf cover because the leaf pieces will not be small enough. If you are not able to keep up with the mulching as the leaves fall, it is recommended that you rake 75 percent of the leaves to thin them out before mowing.
