Landscaping with Leaves

Learn How to Mulch Them

By TIM DOWNEY/ecoRI.org News contributor

Equipped with Gator Blades and Vulcher Safety 

Mulcher, Tim Downey’s mower turns leaves 

into tiny fragments. (Aesthetic Landscape Care)

When it comes to picking up yard “waste,” it makes more sense to leave the leaves to return to the soil. Mulch mowing is an easy way to do this, but, like me, you may have encountered challenges to successfully mulch-mow while maintaining the look clients have come to expect.

After 15 years in the landscape business, I took a hard look at how my practices were affecting the land, but I struggled with Mother Nature’s bounty of leaves each autumn. Instead of taking a dispersed volume of material and gathering it together to make a pile that then has to be removed and disposed of, I wondered if I could take the dispersed volume of leaves, make the leaf pieces smaller and disperse them further, until they “disappeared.” 

Would that harm the lawns I was trusted to care for? Would my properties look messy? If I left all those leaves essentially in place, what would that look like?

I found answers to my initial questions while walking in the woods in September 2003, when I realized there was no familiar crunching beneath my feet. I looked down and saw nothing but black, beady soil. It was September, and the prior fall’s leaves were virtually gone. 

Of course, I know that leaves break down, but I never took the time to watch it occur. It had been wet that year, the soil biology must have been very active, and all those leaves from the previous fall were digested. What if I could do the same thing on my properties? Make the leaves disappear and have wonderful black, beady soil in their place?

Before my epiphany in the woods, I had tried mowing over my leaves the prior couple of seasons, an endeavor that resulted in messy leaves cut in half or thirds and even more difficult to collect. Now I had a new question to answer: How could I chop or mince those leaves up enough so that I could make them disappear like the leaves in the woods?

The first step was to buy a mulching kit for my ride-on Kubota 54-inch mower, which when combined with the Gator Blades I had been experimenting with looked promising. The mulching kit and Gator Blade combination was a solution for my larger flat properties when the leaves weren’t too deep, but I was only 30 percent of the way to a total solution. When the leaves became too deep or I had piles of leaves, it was tricky to be efficient with that machine.

For the properties with terrain that wouldn’t allow for the use of a ride-on mower, I had to improve the performance mulching of my 52-inch walk-behind machines.

I experimented with different blades on my walk-behind mower, both with and without a catcher. The results were good, but my method wasn’t efficient enough. I had been recording the time I spent on each of my properties using this “new” way vs. the old way of blow-and-gather. I thought that if I could keep the leaves under the mower deck of my walk-behind mower a little longer and still have good mobility, then the one-two combination of my ride on mower and large walk behind would be my answer.

I had come up with an idea for how I could modify my large commercial walk-behind mower and solve my mulching problem. Over the next three winters and the off-season between 2004 and 2006, I promised myself I would figure out how to manufacture my idea. In the winter of 2006-07, I came across something in a trade magazine that looked a lot like what I was going to manufacture, but at 280 bucks, I was too cheap to take the plunge. That changed in September 2008, when I felt the autumn panic setting in. I decided to spend the money.

This new device, the Vulcher Safety Mulcher, when combined with my Gator Blades on the commercial walk-behind mower, was my mulching miracle realized. That said, I didn’t have overnight success; there is a learning curve. 

I continued to take copious notes on my time spent on properties over the seasons and made annual observations, gaining confidence over time that my mulching technique wasn’t detrimental to my properties. I learned how quickly the different leaf types took to break down into and become part of the soil.

I never told my clients what I was doing. I gradually developed the process on the easiest properties first, and then as I gained confidence, I made strides on the more difficult properties, mulching more each season to see if I would hit a threshold as to how many leaves the property could absorb.

My clients don’t mind paying for me to mulch their leaves, because in my case, it doesn’t cost them more. Gone are the disposal costs, which I used to pass through on my monthly billing. I don’t haul stuff away anymore; everything stays on the property, which is the most ecological approach. 

Perhaps it’s social guilt or a genuine interest to do the right thing, but the demand in the area I service is growing exponentially as the word has gotten out.

The advantages of mulch mowing are threefold:

Financial improvement. As a property manager, you can gain efficiencies in on-site labor, autumn season preparation time, disposal costs, transport time, equipment costs and more once you properly configure your existing mower equipment with mulching blades, install the proper mulching kit and gain the skill.

Soil benefit. By rediscovering the law of return and employing mulch mowing in your land-care practice, you’ll be feeding the organisms that help make soil rich. Instead of breaking the natural soil nutrient cycle, you’ll be working in concert with it.

Changing client perspective and doing the right thing. In my experience, as long as I maintain a cared-for appearance, my clients want to do the green thing. In the end, it saves them money while making my business more profitable. That message travels by word of mouth and brings me pre-qualified clients.

This story was originally published in the October 2013 Ecological Landscaping Association newsletter. Tim Downey, president of Aesthetic Landscape Care Inc., has been mulching leaves since 2000 and encourages others to do the same.