Awesome, an excuse to be lazy in the fall! Melissa Hopkins, a spokesperson for the National Audobon Society, is encouraging people not to bag up their leaves, because 8 million tons of them end up in landfills every year. (The leaves are biodegradable, of course, but the bags are not.) Instead, you can compost them, rake them onto trees and shrubs to serve as mulch, or just leave them on the lawn if the leaf cover is thin enough. If it's not, you can break them up with a lawn mower.
The best part of this is Hopkins' attitude towards that suburban curse, the Perfect Lawn:
For people who struggle with having leaves spread across their lawn, Hopkins offers a new way to look at your lawn.
"Instead of this perfectly manicured, untouchable space, think of it as this living, breathing habitat," she says. "And when you start thinking about it that way, you're going to start seeing that the more that you do stuff like this, the more birds are going to be attracted to your yard, diversity of birds, insects, butterflies. And with this leaf cover, come spring, it's going to go into the ground. So you're going to have your nice green lawn again."
Leaves were falling onto grass and shrubs long before humans were around to complain about it, so basically if you sit tight and don't get too fussy over your lawn, it'll be fine.
