Rotting Leaves

The Leaf Drop

• Leaves serve as food producers, harvesting sunlight. This creates a chemical reaction between water molecules and carbon dioxide to produce sugars and starches that nourish all parts of the tree. They also store valuable nutrients and minerals absorbed by the tree's roots. As the days shorten and nights grow cooler in areas that experience distinct changes in seasons, the leaves change colors and fall to the ground. During the decomposition process, all the nutrients the leaves contained are redistributed back into the soil, acting as natural fertilizer.

Woodlands and Gardens

• In forests and other undisturbed places, rotting leaves simply revert back to their natural substances, creating a thick carpet as they accumulate and creating a rich black humus in which all plants thrive. This benefit can be applied to gardens as well by using them as mulch around flowers and vegetables, adding them to compost or allowing them to decompose in plastic bags for later use. Rotting leaves contain many of the same valuable nutrients and minerals supplied by expensive fertilizers, such as nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, among many others. In the scientific world, the release of nitrogen into the soil is of primary interest to biochemists who are trying to determine its effects on the amounts being released into the environment that relate to changes in weather patterns.

Uses

• Rotting leaves make an excellent mulch between rows of vegetable plants, discouraging weeds and helping the soil to retain moisture. Added to compost, leaves provide one of the brown materials necessary to a well-balanced blend. Shredding newly fallen leaves helps to speed decomposition, but rotting leaves, showing signs such as a black crumbly texture, can simply be added to the pile so that microorganisms can finish the job of breaking them down completely.

Benefits

• Not only do decaying leaves add nutritional components to the soil, but they also improve its texture and density. As they rot, leaves separate into smaller pieces that deteriorate even more over time, resulting in leaf mold, a substance that gives good garden soil its characteristic rich, earthy aroma. Leaf mold lightens heavy clay soils and imparts moisture-retaining qualities to loose, sandy soils by binding their particles more tightly together. Soil enriched with rotted leaves is lighter, fluffier, easier to work with and creates a subterranean environment through which plant roots can move easily.