BLAINE, Minn. – (Oct. 29, 2015) –
Preparing your yard for the winter and the snow can be a big task. You may have to take care of your sprinkler system, or make sure outdoor water spigots are turned off, or maybe you have to insulate your rose bushes. Even if you don’t have any of those tasks, you probably have to do something with the leaves in your yard that keep adding up. This week, we got the scoop on the best thing you can do with those leaves to help guarantee a healthy lawn in the spring.The changing of colors is beautiful, but it also comes with a cost. Leaves are everywhere, and they aren’t done falling yet. But, they aren’t a complete nuisance, because they can give their nutrients to your yard.
“Well, in those leaves are a lot of nutrients that your grass could actually use,” said Dawn Doering of the Coon Creek Watershed District.
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In addition to giving your lawn some extra nutrients, there may even be another benefit for you.
“Saving you money from saving you having to fertilize. And actually, now the recommendation from the University of Minnesota is to not fertilize this late in the year because the grass won’t take it up and it ends up just going down the drain. Your money is going down the drain as well in the spring when the snow melts.”
For those with a lot of tree cover, or with a yard completely covered with leaves, Dawn says that you might have to rake and remove some of the leaves, but if you do choose to go that route, you can still make smart decisions with your leaves.
Doering said, “If you have too many leaves and it’s just not possible to mulch them all or mow them in the fall, then sure, rake them up, but you do want to have them hauled away either by the city hauler or you can take them to the county compost site and then they an be reused and get recycled back into the compost in the spring that other people can use in their yards or gardens.”
One of the worst things that can happen is the leaves ending up in the street. Because from there, they hit the storm sewer and can have a profound impact on our local waters.
“Those leaves because they have those nutrients in them, if they’re in the streets and the rains come, wash them down, they go into, probably, your nearest waterway whether it’s a pond or a creek or a lake to a pipe system. And those leaves add all those nutrients to that water. When it heats back up next year, then algae can grow and it will turn into a thick pea green soup and smell bad, and it’s really not good for the aquatic life in that water. It’s just bad all around,” explained Doering
And our waters flow into the water that impacts people hundreds of miles away.
“It all eventually, in this area, goes to the Mississippi River and it just so happens that Coon Creek which is the nearest Creek in this area and what we base our whole district on empties into the Mississippi River in Coon Rapids and it’s just upstream of the drinking water intakes for the City of Minneapolis and St. Paul. So, what we do here impacts our local aquatic wildlife, all those critters and fish in the streams and the animals that use those critters in the water and the streams. It also impacts everyone downstream too.”
The Mississippi River borders ten states on it’s path to the Gulf of Mexico, and at least 18 million people get their daily water supply from the river, so keeping the river clean is a very important and very big job.
Doering concluded, “We think, you know, it’s just my yard, I’m just one person, what can I do? But when you multiply yourself by your neighbors, by your neighborhood, by your city, by the other cities, by the state, to all those states you just mentioned it really adds up fast.”