While you may only get a handful of trees that turn out truly beautiful foliage this fall, you will likely still wind up with a yard full of leaves. Deciduous trees lose their leaves at different times throughout the winter months and when the trees shake off the leaves, they settle into a carpet on your lawn.
While crunching through leaves might be terrific fun, leaving those leaves in place on your lawn can actually cause damage to your grass in the long term. If you have just a handful of leaves on your lawn, your grass will be fine, generally. But if your trees produce a thick carpet of leaves, the matted leaves will block sunlight and air from circulating correctly.
The loss of sunshine and air will cause any plant to wither and die, and this is exactly what you can expect from your grass. In the case of leaves, the best defense against damage is to have the leaves collected on a regular basis to avoid the thick piles which can lead to problems.
