Mulching of leaves can be a daunting task but it needs to be done in order to keep your lawn and garden protected and clean. It's particularly important to do this in autumn. It's best to mulch the leaves with your mower. This is the fastest and most effective method of mulching.

Mulching is important for your garden because it's very beneficial for the plants. It helps create a compost of nitrogen-rich and nutrient rich particles of grass as well as carbon-rich leaf particles. This compost is very important for your garden plants.

This is an excellent way to prepare your yard for the winter months. This is an excellent, effective and useful way to dispose leaves. This will reduce a pile of leaves to about 1/10 of its original volume. In addition to this, mulching mixes grass clippings with the leaf particles. It helps creating compost more quickly since they are mixed together.

Handy Tips for Mulching of Leaves

In order to do effective mulching, you should choose a multi-tasking, quality mower. It's best to choose a model that can mulch, side-discharge and bag. These are ideal for leaf removal.

Side discharge is ideal if you wish to mulch leaves back into your yard or if you wish to chop them into fine particles you'll later pick with the mower and bag. This is the best method for tall, moist grass or if the leaf cover is wet or heavy.

It's important to mow in stripes in order to cut the discharged stripe from the previous pass. Also, you can mow outward or inward in concentric circles. This way, you will cut and recut the particles.

It's also possible to set your mower to mulch. This is a great method for grass of normal weight and leaves that may be dry or moist but not wet. To do this, insert the mulch plug in the mower. Close the side-discharge port. After this, mow as you would normally, but make sure to do a second pass at a right angle to mulch throughly all of the clippings back into the grass.

You may also bag the clippings. This is great for grass of normal weight and dry leaves. You should use a small tarp and dump all of the mulched leaf and grass particles onto the tarp. After this, drag the pile to the edge of your yard or somewhere outside your property (such as woods) to dispose it. If you use paper leaf-collection bags you can dump all of the mulched leaves into the bag as you go.

Photo credit: George Wesley & Bonita D