Don't leave it!

I'm delighted to welcome a guest writer to the team, someone whose wise words you might read in the nature notes section of The Guardian - Derek Niemann. He and his wife Sarah have a tiny garden partially shaded by a Sycamore tree from next door. It's a mixed blessing in autumn, as Derek reports:

The heaviest showers this autumn came, not from the skies, but from that blessed Sycamore tree, whose giant leaves rained down on our garden over a mercifully short two-week period. Once the wind had flicked the last one off, it was time to act.

Frankly, those that fall into the flowerbeds can stay there. They'll provide a thin blanket for the soil and they'll break down harmlessly there, releasing nutrients back from whence they came. I'll gather most of those that fall on the grass. In a well-punctured bag, they'll rot down over the next eighteen months and make good compost. Those that are left are "the worm's share", to be tugged underground on mild nights. Sycamore leaves are tough, leathery old things, so the worm’s midnight feast is a chewy one.

The pond is a different matter. It's a wind's breath away from the tree and it swallows a huge number of leaves. It's helpful to get most of them out because such a bulk of decomposing material next spring would deprive the pond of oxygen. Call me a masochist, but I prefer to dip down with bare arms to haul them out, rather than use a rake. It's largely because I shake off the wild passengers before the leaves end up in a compost pile. And what passengers! Virtually every leaf had a pond snail or three (right). Some had a water louse, and, remarkably, a fair number had a torpid damselfly larva clinging on. Most of them proved unshakably obdurate, so I dropped them back into the water. Perhaps I’ll see them in their adult brilliance a few months from now.