Five green, eco-friendly things you can do with your leaves!

Ahhh....Fall!

It's such a great time of the year. Cooler weather. Beautiful color. And don't forget all the outdoor fun!

With fall, however, come all those leaves.

Living in the mountains we are very, very familiar with leaves. Dogwood leaves, oak leaves, maple leaves, ash leaves, birch leaves, redbud leaves...well you get the idea!

One thing we like to do is be sure and enjoy our leaves and appreciate the nature that they are!

After the fun what do you do with those leaves? We're sharing some of our great green ideas of what you can do with your leaves this Fall!

Mow 'em! If you don't have a ton of leaves, you can actually leave them in place in your lawn and mow over them. These mulched leaves create wonderful organic matter and nutrients that can be tremendous fertilizer for your lawn.

Got a vegetable garden? Use leaves to create a wonderful insulated cover and weed barrier in your vegetable and flower garden, whether they are whole leaves or chopped.

Compost! Add your unwanted leaves to your compost pile. Leaves, along with grass clippings, vegetable waste and more, over time, creates a wonderful nutrient rich compost that you can later add to your vegetable or flower garden, and even lawn, to feed your plants and help them grow organically.

Make a playground! One of Gracie's and YoYo's favorite things in the fall is playing in the leaves. They run around, dig in deep into the pile, enjoy the wonderful woodsy smells. They never tire of leaf fun!

Get crafty! Over the years we've created some wonderful, beautiful crafts from leaves, and the dried weeds and flowers we find in the fields and woods. We made this front door wreath from old grape vines we found, along with some dried hydrangeas and sedum, reused raffia and topped it off with a nice fall ribbon.

Have fun! And we'll leave you with one of our favorite photos from our back deck last fall....a beautiful view of the fall mountains of North Georgia in the fall.