I was going to say leave them until you got to the part where they are cottonwood leaves.

Just a couple days ago my neighbor was bemoaning all his cottonwood leaves from his huge trees that he was bagging and I rubbed it in that I had maple and oak leaves.
Well, to be honest, I get alot of his leaves too.

We both talked about how his cotton wood leaves mat down and are a mess to clean up in the spring, while my maple and oak leaves stay nice and fluffy.

Some leaves, like maple and oak, curl and stay loose. I use lots of these to mulch all sorts of things like my miniature roses, newly planted daylilies, etc.

But cottonwood leaves mat down and aren't good for mulching. At least that's what me and my neighbors have concluded.

I just leave them. I spent last week mowing the entire 2 acre lawn and picked up some huge amount of leaves / grass clippings, and dumped it all in my veggie garden, but all the leaves that land in the beds, I just leave them there. Even the cottonwood, and I get quite a bit. If I do mow them up, I just dump them out in the border as mulch. They always seem to go somewhere by spring.

Actually, even if you just leave them on the lawn, they disappear pretty quickly too.

almost anything that is organic and will decompose into the soil is a good thing. I can't wait for people to start putting bags of leaves by their trash so I can "recycle them" through my chipper.

Thanks everyone! It makes sense that they would be better if they were run through the lawn mower. We'll have to see if that will get done this fall. Steve seems to prefer to rake up the leaves - which we are saving for lasagne gardening project. So I may leave them this year, and next year use mown up leaves. Or leaves from the locust out front, they're nice and small.

I mulch mow the ones on the lawn, and the bags I get from neighbors either get composted, piled on the garden or spread on the lawn and mulched. On the garden, I usually use a layer of leaves, then a layer of either coffee grounds or grass clippings (if I scalped to overseed), then leaves, etc. Last fall, I had a pile about three feet deep and there wasn't much left in the spring. I just let the volunteer pumpkins grow and planted other stuff directly in what remained on top of the soil (but the pumpkins overtook everything).

I wouldnÂt leave cottonwood leaves on top of any plants without at least chopping them first. I had a huge cottonwood tree at my last house, and the one year, after I raked them, some more blew into one corner on top of the grassÂI hardly even noticed themÂand the way they mat down, by spring most of the grass in that area was dead. The way cottonwood leaves work their way down around things, when several get on top of each other, you wind up with something that looks and feels like a layer of wet leather wherever they are. It seems to block out all light and oxygen, and apparently nothing can live under it. I was really surprised by how much grass they had killed, and wound up trying to reseed a couple areasÂwhich isnÂt easy to do in our dry climate. Maple, and any other leaves that donÂt mat down like cottonwoods, wouldnÂt do the same damageÂtho I do rake and clean up all the leaves I get (from neighborÂs trees), just because I like the way it looks betterÂand IÂm always trying to get as much "stuff" as possible for my compost pile.

I definitely recommend you be sure to clean up any cottonwood leaves that are directly on top of any of the crowns of your perennials.

Skybird

Thanks Dee, you put a new light on something I was already witnessing... In my OP I said that "cottonwood leaves have settled in nicely". I observed that they were tucked in among the plants and sort of clumping together. I thought to myself "well, that will keep the soil from drying out". But now I see how as they continue to build up that could detrimental. So out they go!

Any leaves that fall on our lawn areas get chopped up by the mulching mower. The ones that fall on the flower beds just stay there. I don't have cottonwood trees.