It’s April which means people are venturing out into their yards and gardens to deal with what the fall and winter hath wrought. The urge to get leaves out of the garden is strong, as the sight of the emerging green growth of your perennials beneath is so heartening in our often grim, slow-developing spring season. But wait, stop that raking! Are you destroying habitat for all the pollinators, and eliminating natural food for birds? Aren’t you supposed to “leave the leaves” to help insects and other wildlife? Well, yes and no. Don’t break your rake over your knee in frustration just yet, as I intend to clear up the do’s and don’ts of yard cleanup for those looking to help wildlife.
“Leave the leaves!” It’s a phrase so common in articles, websites, and social media groups relating to pollinators and wildlife friendly gardening that I’ve come to hate it a little bit. Mainly because whoever created this clever, catchy meme left out the most important word – permanently. Unless you leave those leaves somewhere permanently, it really doesn’t matter what you do with them, because not much, if anything, is wintering in the leaves from last fall.
The idea is this – leaf litter, that top layer of fallen leaves above the organic and mineral soil layers in forests, is hugely important to all sorts of invertebrates and vertebrates alike. Various creepy crawlies are active in leaf litter year-round, things like isopods, centipedes, worms, and spiders, providing food for ground feeding birds, shrews, moles, and other animals. Other things bed down in and under the leaves for the winter, like certain moth caterpillars and bees, though they are mostly under the soil and not just the leaves. Here’s the important thing – those bees, moths, and other insects mainly went dormant long before the leaves fell into your garden bed.
Because the “leave the leaves” meme went so viral without that most important final word, permanently, a sort of mythology developed – suddenly everyone thought their decision about when to remove the leaves from their garden beds was a matter of life and death for “pollinators.” I saw one crazed commenter, and I’m not making this up, who suggested someone disown their parents for raking their yard in the fall.
In reality, because the bees and moths that overwinter underground went to bed before those leaves fell into your garden and on your lawn last November, anything that needed leaves for the winter is somewhere else with permanent leaf litter. Many say you need to wait until temps are consistently in the 50s before cleaning out your garden, to give the insects time to wake up, which is another myth. Even if pollinators were somehow in the leaves from last fall, very few insects wake up that early – think about it, does insect activity in your yard really peak in April? No, insects almost all emerge much later than that – some species don’t come out until September.
So what can you do to help wildlife as you ease back into your landscaping duties? What’s most important to insects and birds is that you keep or add as many native plants as possible, especially trees and shrubs like oaks, cherries, and the various native hollies, and native bunch grasses. Avoid insecticides, herbicides, and fertilizer as much as possible. Skip the lawn care and spraying companies peddling year-round chemical dependency programs for your yard. Find some lawn space you never use anyway and replace it with a native grassland seed mix – a field of gently waving Little Bluestem on a dewy morning beats an unnaturally green, manicured lawn hands down, at last in my aesthetic.
Collectively, these practices will result in more native insects that in turn will feed more birds, especially in the critical breeding period when they are feeding all those babies on little green caterpillars and grasshoppers and spiders. So what do we do with this “leave the leaves” thing? Unless we can get “permanently” permanently grafted onto the end of it, I’d like to leave this pithy advice somewhere, namely in the dustbin of meme history.
