Depending on your outlook on life, the leaf fall in autumn can either be a nuisance or a blessing.

It’s a nuisance if you have to sweep the leaves off decks and patios, rake them from lawns so they don’t smother the grass, bag them and send them to the landfill.

But you also can think of them as pennies from heaven that can be spent enriching your garden. For gardeners, they’re nature’s annual blessing: a soft blanket of protection for overwintering vegetables and tender flowers, and the annual replenishment of nutrition for the soil.

Consider that each spring, when deciduous trees and shrubs emerge from dormancy, they take minerals and water from the earth and carbon dioxide from the air and fashion them into new leaves that will manufacture sugars to fuel the plants’ growth of flowers, fruits, seeds and nuts. Every nutrient the plant needs to fulfill its ecological role in our gardens is built into its leaves.

And so, when the leaves fall, they carry those minerals and tissues back to the earth, to decay and feed the trees and shrubs they came from. It’s the gardener’s job to encourage that recycling, not sweep up the leaves and cart them away. And certainly not to burn them, which only pollutes the air and destroys the organic matter.

Removing the fall leaves does a disservice to the wheel of life that revolves in a healthy garden. How do we, as conscientious gardeners, help keep this wheel spinning?

There are several ways, and they all begin with understanding how valuable the leaves are.

A 1966 study by a Scottish environmental research institute of three common deciduous trees — sycamore, horse chestnut and beech — found the leaves of all three contained the elements needed for healthy tree growth: boron, calcium, carbon, copper, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, iron, phosphorus, potassium, sodium and zinc.

The leaves also contained elements that haven’t been proven necessary but are built into leaves by the parent trees anyway (maybe for purposes we don’t understand yet): aluminum, barium, chromium, cobalt, lead, manganese, nickel, strontium, titanium and vanadium. There was also a little nitrogen, plus varying amounts of water, depending on how dry the leaves were, and a lot of organic matter in the form of lignins, cellulose and sugars. And, of course, the leaves were covered with microbes, as is everything in the natural world.

That’s a lot of stuff hauled up to build leaf tissue. It’s a shame to let it go to waste.

The microbes — bacteria, fungi and other protozoa both active and in spore form — are the key to the first way to use our precious pennies from heaven — as a basis for compost.

The microbes that do the composting are already there. The raw organic matter is there. So are the trace elements and two of the three main fertilizing elements (phosphorus and potassium). The only element that’s missing is nitrogen, which is the fuel that drives the microbes to bloom and digest the leaves into compost.

We can add nitrogen as farm animal manure. The best kinds are rabbit, goat, chicken and pig manure. Add one part-quarter manure or commercial bagged manure to three parts quarters leaves.

Layer the leaves and manure in some kind of enclosure, like a cage of chicken wire or three sides of stacked cinder blocks. Keep the pile of leaves and manure moist but not wet. Turn it with a pitchfork every month during the cold weather, and you’ll have rich compost by the time you need it to fertilize spring crops and flower beds.

A second way to use leaves is to put them in black plastic lawn and leaf bags and keep them moist, but again, not wet. In a year or two, you’ll have crumbly leaf mold. Without the addition of nitrogen, it won’t be a complete fertilizer, but it will be a first-class material for conditioning hard and lumpy dirt into soft, friable soil that will kick-start seedlings into strong growth.

Mix the leaf mold 50/50 with the leaf-manure compost you made, and you’ll have a complete fertilizer and soil conditioner in one.

Nature’s first job for fallen leaves is as mulch. That can be your primary purpose for saving fall leaves, too.

If you have a power lawn mower, shake out your bags of stored leaves next to a wall or wooden fence. Run the lawn mower back and forth over them, blowing the shredded leaves against the wall so you can easily collect them. When the leaves are reduced to bits, mulch your garden plants with a deep layer of them, preferably at least 6 inches deep. If you wet them with a hose, they’ll mat down, preventing weed growth and sealing water in the ground to help prevent evaporation. This will enhance drought protection not only by protecting the soil surface from hot sunlight but also by keeping the soil cool, discouraging evaporation.

You also can add organic matter to your garden soil simply by digging leaves into the soil with a spade or spading fork. Just be aware that without an added nitrogen source, the microbes that decay the leaves will scrounge any available nitrogen in the soil to help them decompose the leaves, leaving little for your food or flower crops.

Finally, if part of your yard or landscape is a jungle of weeds and grass you’d like to turn into usable garden space without a lot of work, simply dump your bags of whole leaves on that patch of ground and wet it down so the leaves collapse into a thick mat. Don’t disturb it. After a year, the soil under the leaves will be ready to plant.

Think of leaves as nutrition, mulch, organic matter and soil conditioner — all provided free each year by Mother Nature. She even works this magic with evergreens. Have you ever walked on the ground in a redwood forest? It’s deep and spongy, smells wonderful and grows lovely shade crops of oxalis and ferns. The decayed redwood duff is acidic, just what acid-loving crops like strawberries and blueberries love.

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