Hey there and welcome back to the Beginners Garden podcast. Have you ever had the experience where

there's a specific practice in gardening that makes theoretical sense? In theory, it sounds great,

it sounds easy, but then when you actually start to put it in place, you realize that you have

a lot of questions that you really haven't noticed anybody has been

asking. You may wonder, is something wrong with me? Why does this seem so complicated when

everybody else talks about this so easily? Well, I think we all have topics like that. And for me,

the topic that this happened with has been an issue for me for years,

and that is how to use fallen leaves in the garden.

Everybody talks about using your autumn leaves

as mulch in the garden and how great it is for your soil.

And I understood that intuitively.

You can see that in nature.

The most healthy soils are usually underneath trees that have deciduous leaves that fall

and then that soil builds.

And so it makes perfect sense that we would want to use this resource as we could for our gardens.

But I noticed that when I actually started trying to put this in place years ago, it just

didn't quite make a lot of

sense to me. Let me give you a quick backstory of my experience with this. I don't actually have

deciduous trees in my yard. I have a couple, but not enough to really do anything with. So I just leave those in

place for beneficial insects and all that. But my in-laws and my dad have lots of deciduous trees on their

property. So I remember several years ago when my mom was still living, she bagged up a few

bags of fallen leaves from their yard, and she sent them to to me and I was a brand new gardener

...