Hello, hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. Hope you're doing well. Hope

your Tuesday is kicking off with a bang. So today we are going to cover the

importance of leaves in your garden.

You know, I think growing up and certainly I didn't grow up in an area

where fall leaves were much of a thing, but going on vacations and seeing the leaves fall

and seeing how much of a mess they made.

As a kid I would think, wow, someone has to clean that up.

That sounds like a really bad chore to have.

I'm really glad that my chore is only mowing the lawn.

But now as a gardener, of course you think what a gift that Mother Nature has given us.

So sometimes one of the most abundant crops that you will harvest as fall starts to come are those leaves.

So the longer you garden, really the greater your appreciation for the value of free organic matter.

If you really think about what a leaf is.

Leaves have a bunch of trace minerals.

Trees are drawing them up from deep in the soil,

and they just grow, photosynthesize, dye, fall off, and they just grow photosynthesize die fall off and they provide quite a bit of

nutrition for your soil they feed earthworms they feed the beneficial

microbes in the soil they'll lighten up heavy soils,

and they will help sandy soils retain moisture.

So they're almost like an adaptogenic soil amendment

if you want to call it that.

So they are really just a fabulous source of carbon to balance out all of the

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