Resilient Goshen: Rethinking What We Do With Fall Leaves
GOSHEN, Ind. — This time of year, I like to encourage people to think differently about what they do with fall leaves. Here in the Maple City, thousands of trees growing throughout our city drop a lot of leaves each fall.
Our public tree inventory counts more than 18,000 trees along streets, in parks and on other public property, and private property quite likely contains three to five times that number. That adds up to a lot of leaves.
In recent history, we have come to think that we need to rake up leaves and get rid of them. We used to burn leaves to make them disappear. I remember growing up in Elkhart, where smoldering leaf piles covered our neighborhood in October and November.
Thankfully, municipalities have banned that practice because of the serious health and environmental consequences. Burning leaves is about the worst thing we can do with them. But burning bans meant that we had to do something else with leaves. Most cities and towns now pick up the leaves and take them to a green waste or composting site. That is what we do in Goshen.
Our Street Department picks up leaves that residents rake, drag and cart to the side of the road. Last year, in 2025, the department spent more than $72,600 on labor and fuel for this activity. That’s a lot of time and a lot of money spent on leaves.
Do We Need to Remove All Those Fall Leaves?
What if we did something different?
What if we decided that we didn’t need to spend time, money and effort getting rid of the leaves that fall to the ground? Or at least not nearly so much?
I know that some people invest lots of time and energy in a well-maintained lawn. And I know that people typically see fall leaves as something that will damage a well-maintained lawn. The reasoning is that we need to remove leaves so they won’t kill the lawn beneath them.
I’m sure it’s true that a heavy layer of leaves can kill a lawn if we allow them to remain in place all through the fall, all through the winter and into the spring months when lawns begin to grow again. But I wonder how many leaves, if we leave them alone, actually remain on lawns from November to April? I haven’t done the research, so I don’t actually know, but I’m guessing that most of them will blow away during those five to six months.
Maybe just letting leaves lie is too extreme for some people for any number of reasons. For instance, you might not want your leaves to end up in your neighbor’s yard any more than you want your neighbor’s leaves to end up in yours. So, raking them up is a good neighborly gesture. I appreciate this.
Put Leaves to Work at Home
The question, then, is what to do with the leaves if we don’t get rid of them?
You can compost them at home if you’ve got a small corner of the yard. A 10-by-10-foot space, even a 5-by-5-foot space, can hold a lot of leaves. Dump them in and pack them down. They’ll begin to compost immediately, even through the cold winter months. By the following spring and summer, they will typically disintegrate entirely and become soil.
This nutrient-rich soil consists of the various organic compounds and minerals that your trees pulled from the earth and atmosphere to grow the leaves. You can spread the soil back onto your lawn instead of paying for fertilizer or use it in flower and vegetable gardens.
Not everyone has space for composting leaves, and not everyone wants to compost them. In these cases, you can mulch them with a lawn mower. Mulching breaks the leaves down into smaller pieces that can sift down through the lawn and decompose even more quickly than whole leaves. You can generally leave mulched leaves in place, keeping the nutrients rather than shipping them away.
Keep Leaves and Nutrients Off the Street
Speaking of nutrients, piling leaves at the road’s edge, or worse, on the road itself, creates another issue. Rain percolates through the leaves and absorbs the nutrients. This nutrient-rich stormwater then flows through the storm sewer system and often into our waterways.
The resulting nutrient overload can severely imbalance riparian ecosystems and harm native fauna and flora. The fewer leaves we pile near or on our streets, the better.
Keeping leaves in place isn’t an option for everyone. But for those who have space, or who are just tired of raking leaves, consider some of these ideas as a way to save time and energy for yourself and for our city.
Aaron Sawatsky-Kingsley serves as Goshen’s director of Environmental Resilience and joined the City as its first urban forester in 2006. Readers can find this column bi-weekly on Saturdays in The Goshen News.