probably not bad advice. Maybe he's growing plants that NEED the sandy soil tho?

It's probably good advice though many people are old fashon about their gardens and have trouble leaving mulch on the ground around their plants. They are just used to bare dirt between the rows. Or sand.

Here in Sandy parts of FL people joke that gardening in FL is like hydroponics. The sand holds the plant up and we have to provide everything else. For many people that means lots of chemical fertilizers that saddly leach out of the sand very quickly (polluting our water supplies) and need to be replaced all the time.

To really change that picture of gardening in sandy Florida, it takes an immence amount of organic matter (yes any little bit helps but to make much difference requires quantity.)

So anyway, I think it's good advice to leave the leaves. However, if it is only a thin scattering of leaves, it may be difficult to see a marked difference for the good if he follows your advice. However, if he has huge drifts of leaves landing on his garden, then mulching them on the garden for the winter should be wonderful for the worms next season.

"I don't have a vegetable garden, but I made several passes with the lawnmower over my flower gardens lately to mulch some leaves into them. It is my first year of doing so."

Reducing leaves only speeds up the process not the end result unless the leaves are so thick that they will impede growth but they still decompose sooner or later.

Leaves are designed to fall, pile up and decompose slowly returning the nutrients to the trees. Trees don't make leaves for gardens, we just take advantage of the system.

Unless they are thick or we pile them thick it doesn't matter.

When I told all my farmer friends where I was moving when I bought my place 13 years ago, they all got that far away, thinking look and then said "oh yea. It's real sandy over there." They weren't kidding. Technically a soil scientist would say we have gravel. You can't drive a car on it, it's too soft and you will get stuck.
I have used what y'all are calling lasagna gardening since we move here and it works great! I also recommend horse manure for sandy soils, since horse tends to tighten soils.
Why not suggest that he try a row of it. I'm sure he has a tried and true method that works for him, but the suggestion that it could be a lot less work may be enough to get his interest and he just may try a spot.

Any sandy soil will need organic matter, to fill in the pore spaces between soil particles so both nutrients and moisture can be held in that soil. Applying just horse manure, or any other manure, to sandy soils will do little since without sufficient levels of vegetative waste to help hold it there that manure will simply follow the water out. Rutgers, what you suggested to your neighbor was good since what ever he was putting on his sand was just going down and flowing out to the Atlantic without some organic matter to hold it in his soil.

My goal at this point is to simply be a good role model for organic living and hope to inspire a few people along the way. I have created a monster with the neighbor on my one side, as he is mulch mowing his lawn and just about every leaf he can find. I caught him mulch mowing my flower beds the other day, and now he is thinking of buying a blower that doubles as a leaf shredder so he can suck up the leaves between his bushes, shred them, and put them right back down from where they came.

Impressive that your neighbors heed your advice. My neighbors shake their heads and laugh their butts off at me. I'm sort of the comic relief.

Karen

kimmsr, yes I agree. Horse needs to be part of a mix, not by it's self. Sorry, that wasn't clear. I usually mix about 1 part horse to 6 parts other stuff, roughly by eyeball and how thick it's spread.