I have used them all for many years - just mt experience - with no problems. We have an abundance of various oak, hickory, sycamore, mimosa, maple, birch, even a few black walnut and I can't see any advantages or disadvantages to sorting out leaves.

They all decompose tho oak take longer than many. They all get added to the compost piles. They are all used to make leaf mold, and they all get used as mulches.

Dave

The best leaves to use are the ones you can get the easiest, the ones that are locally available.

you don't say where you are, which would tell us what kinds of trees might be growing in your area.

There's no reason not to use magnolia, of any of the numerous kinds. Evergreen magnolia leaves make the best mulch when they've been shredded, and I just can't imagine why the many deciduous kinds would be considered undesirable.

I use everything that falls in the yard - madrone, cherry, douglas-fir, big leaf maple, willow, mountain-ash, aspen. Madrone leaves are similar to the evergreen magnolias, in fact the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle was named so by the early settlers who apparently couldn't tell the two species apart. And our big leaf maples are very aptly named - juvenile leaves can be 18" across. I like those for packing the bonsai into for winter protection. Both get raked into the shrub borders as-is for mulch.

Use whatever you can get for the least effort. Tougher and/or larger leaves will need to be shredded for composting or for mulching small plants like perennials. A few species are thought to be phytotoxic, like eucalyptus and walnut. But oak and maple leaves are excellent material, nice and soft and easily decomposed. I know I see people saying that maple leaves are not good because they mat or something, but I've never had that be an issue myself.

"I know I see people saying that maple leaves are not good because they mat or something, but I've never had that be an issue myself."

Don't know whether you get much frost, but here, yes, they'll mat and, with frost/cold, will hold that ice in. Regardless, I throw unshredded maple leaves onto the pile. In fact, at my former house, I never once in the almost 20 years I lived there, raked away the accumulation of maple leaves from the neighbors' trees that fell onto the back of one of my beds. The result? Dead irises and chrysanthemums (well duh! Lots of shade, which increased year by year), but the most amazing near-black beautiful soil you could imagine. Shrubs, hostas, and ferns took to the stuff like you wouldn't believe.

BTW, I have two mature magnolias here in the fenced-in area, and I'm using them in my piles. Why waste them? However, I would like to first add other shredded leaves into order to get some nice activity going first.

I've got 18 bags of magnolia leaves that I've been just holding onto until I can get a shredding plan worked out. I'm certainly not going to put them on the curb :) A lot of my other leaves have been put in the piles whole or nicely shredded by whoever bagged them. I'm an equal opportunity composter, if I can't get the magnolias shredded, I'll still compost them in a hot pile.

Most of the leaves in my area are either oak, maple, or sweet gum. They are all fine, but I hate the sweet gum balls.

When I bag shredded leaves for inside storage; the oak is the my favorite the other two break down partly over the winter and spring months. Not that this is a bad idea, they will soon be put to use in the compost piles where this sort of thing is encouraged. But the moisture in the gum and maple leaves makes a fine dust plus it rots out the bottom of the paper bag so it can't be reused.

If I had to select just one leaf to use, it would be the wonderful oak leaf. It also seems my shredder shreds the oak leaves a bit smaller than the maple or sweet gum. But a mix is what the neighbors put out on the curb, and a mix is what I use. I don't feel that paper is anywhere as good.

If you can get your mind around the simple fact that all leaves have been taking nutrients out of your soil all during the growing season, and that most of those nutrients are still in those leaves, then all leaves are good. How you use them might make a difference. The leaves from the 4 Magnolias in a courtyard at our church have not had a detrimental affect at all and we have not cleaned them up for 10 years now. Those leaves, like all the others are mulch mowed in to the soil or are simply banked on the planting beds to feed the Ivy that grows there, rampantly. My Black Walnut leaves mostly get mulch mowed into the grass and the only detrimental affect I have seen is that the growth of the Quack Grass in inhibited while the Perennial Rye is encouarged.

I've gotten several bags with what I'm quite sure are aspen leaves. I ran them through the mulcher and they came out about the same as they went in. I tried again with the leaf blower/vac/shredder, and same thing... I thought about trying the mulching mower, but I didn't want to have to rake them back up if it didn't do anything to them.

greenbean08, if leaves went through a shredder without getting shredded there was something missing from the shredder that needed to be there, like a screen. I have had small size leaves go through a blower/vacuum with no change, because these are not real shredders, those small knives will only cut up large material. Whether your mower will do better depends on how you use it, but I've not had a problem with the size of the material mine discharges most of the time. If necessary I will go over that material twice.