Maybe I’m the odd one, but I just can’t seem to wrap my head around raking up leaves, stuffing them into a big black garbage bag and setting them out on the curb to be picked up in a truck, driven across town and buried.

Through spring and summer, trees are drawing trace minerals from deep in the soil and storing them in their leaves. Full of carbon, fallen leaves are food for our critters below ground, feeding earthworms and microbes, which create nutrient-rich topsoil. Leaves help lighten heavy soils, creating space for life to thrive. They also act like a sweater, insulating bare ground and tender plants from the cold.

So for the love of life, let’s not treat our leaves like garbage!

To keep or to gift?

Since leaves make a fantastic mulch, you can use yours to mulch your garden beds, bare ground in your yard and even your lawn.

You can also experiment with composting by layering leaves with a nitrogen source like manure or bone meal. Create a ratio of 5:1—five parts leaves to one part nitrogen. Make a layered pile and keep it moist. If you turn the heap each month, you’ll have a pile of great compost come spring.

If you have no use for leaves or compost, or aren’t interested in the work, consider gifting your leaves—that is, ensuring they return to the soil.

Both Mesa and Montrose Counties offer a variety of recycling (composting) programs.

Grand Junction and Palisade offer leaf pickups beginning this month. In Grand Junction, leaves are transported to the Mesa County Organic Materials Composting Facility to be turned into compost.

Palisade’s program picks up leaves and takes them directly to local farmers and home gardeners who want to use leaves for mulch (call 464-5602 to request leaves).

Montrose citizens can drop off grass clippings and leaves at the Montrose City Public Works facility free of charge. These materials are sent to a compost facility and then into gardens.

If there’s no existing program in your area, try reaching out to a friend or local farm. Someone would be thrilled to recycle your leaves into their soil.

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Grow garlic for the health of it

My favorite way to get leaves back in the ground has got to be growing garlic.

Packed with vitamins and minerals, garlic is a medicine as well as a key player in the kitchen. According to herbalist Rosemary Gladstar, garlic treats colds and flus, boosts the body’s immune system, is a powerful antiseptic, antibacterial and antimicrobial agent and is effective for maintaining healthy blood cholesterol levels.

It’s also quite easy to grow in our arid climate.

Order garlic now to plant this month. Many seed companies offer discounts at this point in the year. To plant garlic, break a head apart into cloves, then plant each root-end down in fertile soil with good drainage. Cover with two inches of soil and six inches of leaves, which act as insulation.

Once in the ground, garlic is low maintenance. Begin watering in the spring, and you’ll harvest delicious heads in July.

Letting nature do fall is one of my favorite gardening philosophies. Returning nutrients to the soil is one of the easiest steps we can take toward creating rich garden ecosystems.

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• Clean up spent crops by pulling them or cutting plants at the base, leaving roots in the ground to compost themselves.
• Leave seed heads of flowers to feed the birds, or harvest seeds for next year’s garden.
• Add compost and mulch to garden beds as a nutrient-rich blanket.
• Seed wildflowers after the first frost, right before a snowfall.
• Seed winter greens like arugula, kale and mustard greens to harvest through fall and into winter.
• Divide perennials and plant spring-flowering bulbs.

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