A Monday quick thought – many photographers lament the time in autumn after the leaves fall off of the trees. “Stick season”, or “season of brown” are common references after the commonly sought after fall color scenics have passed. I actually look forward to this time of year as a challenge. To practice noticing patterns and details on the ground. A challenge to my own abilities to see the smaller, more intimate scenics. And when you view autumn opportunities in this way, the season suddenly lasts much, much longer.
Leave the Leaves
This time of year I also notice so many neighbors raking, raking, raking and bagging. Piles of bags of leaves stacked at the curb to be taken away. I wish more people recognized that leaves are natural assets. Natural assets, natural sources of fertilizer we have on our own property. People rake them away, pay in our taxes for a company to take them away, and then pay someone to bring fertilizer back. How does that make any sense? Maybe to lawn care companies! Leaving the leaves is so much better for biodiversity and replenishing the soil around our overly manicured pieces of this planet.
Featured Image: This is just a small scene in our backyard pond, photographed just a couple of days ago. Image ID # LE10455 Pond Leaves, Sterling Heights, Macomb County, Michigan. More leaf pictures.
bread => break 🙂
Mulch. We use a small electric shredder/chipper at our previous home to run the fallen leaves through to bread them down for quicker decomposition. It didn’t require any more work than putting them in a bag, and it made great mulch to insulate the ground and feed other plants. By spring, the leave mulch was totally broken down and gone. It’s crazy that people will throw away leaves and then buy mulch.
Exactly! There are a lot of discussions about leaf bagging now in our city. There are simply smarter ways to go about this.
I also noted how soft leaf mulch feels this past weekend when I was sitting on the ground trying to make some images.
I’m in agreement with you on this. The leaves have a purpose in the life cycle of nature. A few years ago I watched a woman with a leaf blower strapped to her back blowing leaves across the parking lot while leaves were falling from the trees behind her. Sometimes our thinking is insane. I’m not one to support our ideology of lawns, either. The lawns are a waste of money, harmful for the environment, and the mowing, and blowing are noise pollutants. I enjoyed the linked article! Thanks!
I wonder if we have now progressed into a generation that has no concept about gardening, growing our own food, canning food and placing it in a cellar. We’ll just drive 3 miles to the store and buy packaged food (and hopefully wearing a mask).
I wish we had an option of doing away with our lawn completely, but seems city ordinances get in the way. What a silly thing to regulate eh? A monoculture plant that does nothing for the environment. Feels good on your feet though. But all the focus on maintenance, the blowers, the chemicals … drives me nuts. Definitely an example of our detachment from nature.
It is a tough time but on the other hand I’m a bare tree fan. I think it’s important to ‘force ourselves’ to see all the time or else I’d just be out in spring and in fall. That’s my natural attraction anyway. Winter is particularly hard because I hate the cold….but I’m really going to try.
Nothing wrong with winter photography from a warm car! 🙂
I’m going to do it this year.
When I was a kid, my father always gave this sermon. It took me many years to learn that he was right. Thanks for your version—and the photo.
Wise man Linda. We have a huge volume of leaves. For a while, we would just blow them into the woods, but now we just mulch them in place and leave them. Other places just leave them altogether. One wonders just how much of our lawn-obsessed country is influenced by those that produce products for those lawns.