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There's a Few Right Ways to Pick up All Those Leaves After a Windy Wednesday

Matt Trotter
/
KWGS

There’s a little less fall color on the trees and a lot more on the ground in Tulsa after winds hit 50 miles per hour on Wednesday.

A lot of people are faced with a big cleanup job, but there's a wrong way to do it.

"The one thing we don't want them to do is bag them up and send them to the landfill," said horticulturist David Hillock with OSU. "But they have other options, mostly mulching and composting them."

You can still start a compost pile now if you don’t have one already.

"Full sun and moisture and warm temperatures is best, but they'll still break down over the winter months as well," Hillock said.

Small leaves can be raked right into flower beds to serve as winter mulch. If you have big leaves or too many to rake, the job doesn't have to be much harder.

"My yard seems to collect all the leaves in the neighborhood, so I just get out there as often as I need to before they get too deep and just run over them with a lawnmower," Hillock said. "I don't usually catch them, I usually just run over them so that they just fall back to the ground as small little pieces."

The chopped leaves will return nutrients to the soil.

Matt Trotter joined KWGS as a reporter in 2013. Before coming to Public Radio Tulsa, he was the investigative producer at KJRH. His freelance work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and on MSNBC and CNN.