It’s almost quitting time for maples, elms and oaks in the Capital Region.

Leaves of lush red, bright yellow and deep orange are already falling. Cleanup crews are on the job, raking up autumn and preparing lawns for winter.

Susan Pezzolla appreciates leaves, rakes and exercise on a Sunday afternoon — as long as tall, brown bags are not part of the party.

Pezzolla, community educator for horticulture at Cornell University Cooperative Extension of Albany County, said leaves can spend winter and spring in flower and vegetable gardens. Ecological uses for arbor discards are easy to find and employ.

“Gardeners are very frugal in general and they hate to throw anything out that might be useful to the garden,” Pezzolla said.

Leaves show up for free, always in bulk, and people seem to throw out way too many of them. According to Cooperative Extension figures, Americans toss out 24 million tons of leaves and grass every year; leaves alone can account for 75 percent of solid waste generated during fall months.

Replenishing nutrients

The garden experts also say fallen leaves contain between 50 percent and 80 percent of the nutrients a tree extracts from the earth. By composting or recycling leaves, people can help the earth replenish itself.

Pezzolla said folks can also keep parts of the earth warm. Plants can use leaves during December, January and February. The best thing to do is mulch them up.

“Mow them over twice with a lawn mower, from two different directions,” Pezzolla said. Then, she said, pour piles of confetti-sized reds and yellows into gardens.

But you don’t want to act too early. Adding a layer of mulch before the ground freezes is an invitation to rodents to nest and possibly damage the crowns of perennials, said Natalie Walsh, The Daily Gazette’s garden columnist. “The best time to mulch is after the ground is frozen. This will protect the roots best, and rodents are likely to have found alternate winter housing,” she added.

Mulching “will conserve moisture and will add a tremendous amount of nutrition to the soil,” Pezzolla said. “It helps break up soil texture, for instance. Heavy clay soil would benefit from the organic matter that the leaves would produce.”

In perennial beds, chopped leaves will help prevent newly planted plants such as mums from “heaving” out of spots in the ground. These are plants whose root systems have not yet been completely established.

“They can almost rise out of the soil with this alternative freezing and thawing,” Pezzolla said.

People shouldn’t bury the plants in mulch. Two to 4 inches of the organic mix is plenty. And by April, the natural blanket does not have to be raked out.

“By spring, they’re all pretty well decomposed,” Pezzolla said. “It becomes part of the soil. It really does a lot to add micro elements back into the soil. This is especially important for vegetable gardens where crops are pulling a lot out of the soil.”

And while gardeners appreciate the ecological and financial benefits of mulch from the trees, they also know they are keeping man-made mixes out of the dirt.

“It’s all about the health of the soil,” Pezzolla said. “We are trying to convince people that you don’t have to use a lot of chemicals to enhance your soil, if your soil is healthy by using natural elements.”

Leaves can also give grass a nutritional boost.

But not chopped, diced or pulverized leaves —the particles will still be too big to decompose into the soil.

“The best thing to do would be to chop them up and compost them for a while until they begin to break down into more of a compost material, like dirt,” Pezzolla said.

“That very rich, organic soil-like matter could then be put into a spreader. Or, if it’s too chunky, some people put it through a screen, like a big wire mesh, to get out the chunkier pieces. So then you have a very soft, fluffy material that you can put in your spreader and apply a very light top coating, like a quarter of an inch, right to your grass. And then the rain waters that in.”

Beneficial uses

Pezzolla offered other tips for falling colors:

-- Wet leaves can be spread on unused, weedy parts of the garden. They will suffocate weeds by forming a thick mat.

-- You can make leaf mould — a dark, crumbly, soillike material prized by gardeners — by mowing up leaves and mixing the pile with grass clippings. Rake into a large pile, or a six-inch layer over the garden, and wait until spring. The mixture of carbon-rich leaves and nitrogen-rich grass makes the best humus.

-- Leaves can be used to cover food waste, for a beneficial balance of carbon and nitrogen in your compost.

-- Brown bags can be used to help the environment: Place leaf bag around compost bins for insulation, to retain some of the compost’s own heat and slow down freezing. Use about 20 bags, placing them on their sides to exclude rain.

With all the good elms and maples can do, Pezzolla and other gardeners look forward to fall.

“A good leaf is a terrible thing to waste,” she said.